Emails are owed
Like sweating, or squinting in sunlight, loneliness has become reflex - nothing but response to my environment. This is the outline of my reclusion: I embark on vast empty walks not so much because I love nature but because I love the emptiness; I walk down the streets looking out for people I know, so I can avoid them; my room is womblike, and I have a nearly pathological concern about doors that are not fully shut. But inside my mind, everything seethes and sizzles in rhythmic connectivity, memories, snatches of conversation, smells, ideas, anxieties, ideas, the furious grinding of conclusions resisting articulation - everything surges against everything else, so proximate that the friction sparks new threads of thought. And I'll lie on the grassy hilltop, a particle bared on a petri dish under the domed lens of a watchful sky, and I imagine spreading my arms and embracing the quiet vastness, squeezing, compressing it into the tiniest area possible - a stamp-sized square of distilled calm - and depositing it in my mind somewhere, just to know a stamp-sized moment of mental peace. Desireless.
I must issue some unconvincing apology to those whom I owe emails to. The essay is now being written. The conclusions have resisted articulation long enough; the epiphanies have come and been had; and I feel nothing but the most profound envy for those amongst you who are able to churn out 5000-word essays within a fortnight.
as for me, loneliness is a novelty, the space outside the safety net. I am accustomed to being alone, but this, being lonely - seems it requires acclimatization, like adjusting to a little less oxygen in the air, a little less of that quiet sound of another's exhalation, like living with the constant roar of the sea until displaced by such unnatural silence that the mind churns in desperation, grasping confusedly at particulars. In such a state of mind, it's possible to bury one's face in one's hands and inhale deeply, reassembling from the faint smell of his cologne on your palms the entire mosaic memory of his being. just in case, you know, i'd forgotten.
The sun is rising. If my calculations are correct I am currently operating on Mexican time. Suggestions on how to reassert sleep normalcy will be greatly appreciated.