“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Are you–nobody–too?” I like to quote that brief phrase sometimes when I’m lonely, frightened, or otherwise confused. I’ve learned enough by now to know that we all ask ourselves that question, even if only in the darkest hours of our nights. When you realize that, sometimes you don’t feel so all alone.
My darkest hours seem to arrive between midnight and four A.M., the time I used to look forward to when my kids were young because then the house was quiet and I could write, play music and guitar, and refresh my muse, as Hemingway said, “from the springs that fed it.” The nights and years have been so lonely since those times, so very lonely, like the times in the middle of the night when the bedroom door would open and a little boy (or two) would crawl into bed with me while his mother worked. “This bed is empty,” goes the Stones song; I’m not sure it’s something you ever get used to.
Love in vain, love in vain; and all is vanity, even the person I believed I once was.
Well, its hard to tell, its hard to tell, but all your love’s in vain
Well, I felt so sad and lonesome that I could not help but cry
It’s okay. No matter what I once believed when I was young and arrogant, I knew I couldn’t live a charmed life forever. It was always so…precarious…even then. And now the worst times are over, finally, and once again I live a life of seeing and possibility. I sometimes joke about the Fitzgerald line that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It wasn’t so long ago that I believed it completely. But I no longer believe it anymore.
