Meditations. Lonely. Thinking about it.

There's a story I'm trying not to write so I'll write about today instead.
Today I spent mostly alone.
This is the way I spend most days.
The painter is gone a-painting, my girls are round and about, sometimes someone shows up in the day, like yesterday when my sister came for a long talk, but for the most part I spend my time alone.
I know not everyone is alone. Women, especially, talk about doing things together, driving and attending and lunching and phoning and buying. I can't get it, can't wrap my mind around how that's done. Feels like algebra.
I think about this a lot, about being alone and being slightly uncomfortable and sad and about trying (with no one to see, no one to check up on me) to make sure I'm whiling away my life in a useful and justified way so I will have plenty of good stuff to talk about with God in our inevitable face-to-face. I wonder about trying to live so that I'll be missed when I die; I want a well-attended funeral. I think about a friend from college, her life stacked, racked, jeweled and enameled with family, acquaintances, intimates, who goes out of her way to try to get me to spend time with human people, phones, drives from her city to mine, tries her best to show me another way. I think in the morning that today I will call a dear friend who is leaving for Oregon, who asked me on Sunday to call her any time before Wednesday (so, that was today) for lunch or dinner or a walk or anything at all. My pick.
Today I spent mostly alone.
I went to a meeting, my version of a social life. I messed with my girls, I wrote my son in Hong Kong, I typed brief notes, some of them to people I have met in the flesh. I answered the phone. I missed a visit from the niece I love like a daughter and her own baby daughter because I was in the shower when she came and then I had to run off to that meeting. People to see. I left my visitors for my girls to enjoy. Now I sit at dusk in my empty house writing a story of emptiness, a song of my alone self, to people who may or may not exist, may or may never read it, will almost surely never tell me if they did or did not, nor will care if I never write here again and I know, this is how I do.
I did not call my friend before she left for Oregon.
Because of what happened instead.
The Provo temple closes at the end of this week, closes for a month. I go there once a week, more often when I can, to be alone and be with God. So I am going every day this week before it closes, one day for each week of the next month since I can't count Monday which does not belong to me it belongs to the family and to yard work when we "descend like locusts and get it all done" (the painter's words and the only way he can stomach yard work) and not counting Saturday which will be a Painter family reunion. So that was the early morning.
Then I had to shop, had to, we had no butter or vegetables. Made breakfast, changed clothes. That was the midmorning.
I have to do some yard work and some house work every day, nothing like all of it but enough not to lose my mind when I see all the thousands of things that need, that must, be done pressing their greasy little faces against the outsides of my windows and the insides of my mirrors. So yard work took till after lunch.
Meeting.
Housework. Not a lot. Some.
Dinner.
This writing.
If it had been a day with no meeting in it I'd have read. You can't read and visit with people, sometimes even libraries are too cozy, too social, too chatty.
I will work on this till bedtime, I will tidy the kitchen, fold the last of the clean clothes, type more, pick up my youngest at the birthday party, read to her, scriptures with the girls, good night phone call to the painter, pray, sleep.
This is very like what will happen tomorrow.
I will spend it mostly alone, a bit sad. In my sadness and my work, a knock will come at the door and my temper will flare. Who? What?
I will catch myself in that irritation, reminded that there is a price tag, a bar code, on all of it, all of my life. We pay for everything and I personally pay rent on an internal studio apartment. I choose this, choose to live alone.
Even though it hurts me.
I really did actually live completely alone once, alone in a house as a student at BYU. The house was for six girls, I was the first and, by some strange intervention of my personal gods and angels, only girl who applied that semester. I didn't know at the time I wasn't allowed to live alone as an single girl at BYU, or at least, I don't think I was. The owner didn't mention this, but I could see he was in a quandary. This had never before happened and he couldn't figure it. He kept stopping by in the first few weeks as if his physical presence might bring rent-payers to the scene. He stomped around, inside and out, talking to himself and occasionally to me, wondering whether he should even rent to me alone or just kick me out, or, alternately, whether I shouldn't be paying a good deal more rent for having a house all to myself if I were really going to be alone in the whole thing. I maintained a stoic silence before both these proposals and after a while he stopped coming by and I was alone. Truly alone for the first time in my life. I had just moved to Provo and knew only one soul, my cousin Laura, in the whole place. I never even found my ward. I didn't have a phone. I. didn't. have. a. phone. I have never been so frightened. I came home from class in the evening and turned on the TV and lamp. I turned them off when I went to class the next morning. Have I mentioned I am terrified of being alone in the night? Sleeping, letting go of listening to every sound, every snick and rustle, of watching every shift of shadow and sweep of light, giving up awareness and control sufficient to slide into unconsciousness took more will power than I had had before I moved into that house. I had to build muscle, grow callouses, just to keep breathing. One evening I hopped outside, barefoot, to throw away my trash and heard the door click shut behind me. Locked. Locked out and no one in the world had a key because there wasn't anyone else. Well, the owner had one, I suppose, but how was I going to summon him? He only came by for rent. So, three weeks. I wandered (carefully) around the house a few times, remembered I had been taught to pray and did, not in a focused and faithful way but in a glazed and scattershot way, ricocheting from fear to fear in the fading light and then just started walking mindlessly down the street, heading south. Apparently God understands glazed and scattershot because I ran, literally, into a boy from one of my classes. He wondered, rightly, what the heck I was doing, shoeless and brainless, and I told him all of it while he walked me back up the street (because north is up) to my house where with cruel and silent efficiency he broke in. He went around the back for a little minute while I waited out front; I thought he would come around the other side as I had a few times, looking the situation over but instead he suddenly just strolled out the front door carrying part of a back window. There you go, he said. It took a second for him to realize what that had done to me. I guess I must have looked as shocked and sick on the outside as I felt on the inside because he started stumbling around trying to be comforting. Oh, I don't think most people could have done that, he said, not as quick or as quiet, anyway, you'd probably have heard them if you'd been inside. Really? Great. He twisted and gripped his hardware bits a little then somberly put the window back together, kindly and awkwardly, hung around sort of miserable for a moment before walking off to the south, calling happy stupid empty little things back over his shoulder, leaving me standing on the front walk in the dark now, looking down the black hole of the front hall through the still locked front door he had just opened from the inside. Really, he had been very nice. I still feel sorry for him. Sometimes at night after that I barricaded my bedroom door from the inside. Here's the great gift from that house. My horrible boyfriend who had misused me for eighteen solid months of my life that I can never get back came to visit me there. First, in a theatrically perfect (always perfect, always theatrical) but graceless and idiotic backhand gesture while making a point about nothing he knocked to the floor and broke a very small and lovely old box of treasures, wooden, with tiny dovetailed joints and handmade hinges. Second, he dumped me for the nth time. For a wonder I didn't cry and beg and cajole and bargain. I found myself seething in rage over my tumbled and plundered box, crying in a terrible relief at the unbidden emptiness I could feel washing and lapping like healing water, a vast blessed ocean, up to and all around me for the first time in a year and a half, and cried more in a sickness and agony of sudden clarity; my life, my time, my days irretrievably squandered and stinking now of ashes and smut. I threw him out of my house, like throwing up poisoned food. His whole face turned into a round pink clown mask of surprise. He was so shocked, so hurt, so disappointed that I was lashed, flayed, by fury and self betrayal all over again. Oh, I hated the pair of us. This was all it had been about all along, the drama, and I had just been too grindingly frightened of being alone to see it. He actually came back into the house after I slammed the door (for effect (and where was my self-locking front door now?)) to try for another scene. He held my arms gently (sick! I'm barfing writing this. hang on, it's almost over) and tried to talk soothingly. I grabbed the phone (oh, hey, I had one by now. things were looking up) and dialed the police. Didn't threaten. Dialed. This was the baddest moment of my life. It was like a movie. I had this amazing soundtrack in my head. I can't remember the song, think eighties stadium-rock. Anything anthemic will do. He left, amazed and bewildered but beaten. I instantly hung up on the cops. No police came. No boyfriends came back, either. I had my house to myself. I barricaded myself in my little bedroom and reveled in my solitary splendor, my lonely dignity, new-found. There are way worse things than being alone.
It only hurts, really, in the evening.
How do I explain that I don't keep in touch because I never was? It's terrifically hard for me to connect, usually I'm standing around inside myself, smiling on the outside, offering to help out so I'll disappear, trying to be funny, waiting for signs that people are tired of me. Real human connection is like a rare and terrible drug; I hold those people very tightly, very close, probably too tightly.
Here's what I can buy with solitude.
Reading.
Reading and eating.
Making bread.
Folding clothes. A meditation.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Gardening. Not yard work.
Dancing.
Reveling.
Costumes, jewelry and clothing. The making, altering.
Scripts and play-building. The homework.
Crying over ancient Korean bowls and Revolutionary War American portraits.
Learning a tree with the palm of my hand, feeling the bark and the living spirit with my inner palm, the part most rarely touched.
Practicing. Stories or poems, lines from Shakespeare, working the sounds and the images, learning the meanings of speaking.
Walking. In woods, by houses, near water. Finding the God I've known longest.
Here's when I've got to have people.
Eating and talking.
Talking.
Sleeping. I don't like being alone. No, I don't sleep being alone.
Worship. In some of its forms.
Dancing with people.
Plays. Movies. Concerts. Performance and its audiences.
Books after I've read them.
Writing and having people help me with that by talking.
Celebrating.
Traditions. If I do it alone it's not a tradition, it's a habit. Or a compulsion.
Shopping. No one shops alone. There are no empty shops. Those shops are closed.
Music. The hugest, wrenching, transforming conversation. How can you be alone listening to music? What have you done with the musicians? Music is my sure-fire way to God as I best understand Him. And love. And hate. Anger, jealousy, silly joy, longing, cleansing, grief, crushes, new cars, tap shoes, first dances, babies and old men, swimming, winter sleep and autumn leaves.
Art. When I'm not crying about it.
My solitary father, who hunts alone and walks alone and works alone told me once the world is full of people with nothing to say talking and talking just to be sure they are still alive. Frightened of their own thoughts, the worst thing in the world, your own thoughts. I think of my dusk-time college television and lamp, warming my darkness, filling it with voices.
Together is dialogue.
Alone is for narrative.
Alone I cut the demonic plum trees from the wild-wood-growth of this Provo house. They leap on me as they go down, twist around me, slashing with their two inch thorns. I labor in an effortless storystream as they fall, slice my scalp and the back of my neck, a gramarye of the plum kingdom's methods and motivations, their histories, triumphs and losses, magiks and lore, their fear of me and my saw, their eventual downfall and certain end. You shall not triumph, plum demons. Ooh, gotta be careful of your eyes, turn your head when the tree comes down, that's how they get you. This storifying is always flowing, has been my constant condition as long as I can remember. Unless another person is there. If someone works with me there's none of that. Together we get the job done more quickly, the other person takes a turn, lifts the end, holds the tree, minimizes blood loss. We tell memories and make plans. We argue our point and concede and score and some of us make terrible puns and keep you up all night. Talking.
All day long I talk to myself. In the evening I'd like to talk to you. Call me, if you're not too busy. Otherwise, I'll listen to music. Read. Sightly uncomfortable. Sightly sad. Thinking about it.



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