For someone who truly enjoys the company of other people, I’m beginning to face the fact that in some ways, I’ve always been sort of a loner. I believe it has something to do with the state of exquisite melancholia sometimes necessary to fuel or express great creativity; I like people too much to consciously avoid the company of others.
When I still worked in state government, I would often take lunch alone and just sit in my car somewhere relaxing for a bit and often listening to NPR (back when I still listened to the radio). I remember one winter in particular when I would park in the Frankfort cemetery, near the bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, the bridge, and the Capitol, and just sit there thinking how lucky I was to have an office looking out on the building’s front lawn (fourth window from the left, if you ever see a picture). I felt pretty important then, to be honest about it; I felt very young. But life has a way of leveling things out, and although I didn’t know it then, my day would come soon enough. I was headed for a reckoning I could never have anticipated, and to this day one I’m not sure I truly deserved.
“April is over,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “April is over.” I’m not sure what month it is now (although the calendar says almost September). But I know that’s life’s transient joys are worthless without someone to share them with, and that even for a writer, even the best solitary memories are fated to end up as mere words on a page. Without friends, without someone close to your heart, even the best moments of happiness are little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
