As I get older, I yearn more for more alone-time. I've always kind of been this way, but lately it has been getting stronger. Before my father died, I remember going crabbing in Puget Sound with him and his best friend; as we sat on the boat after dropping the pots, the two of them got to talking about wives. "Yes, it can be difficult to be married", said his friend, "but just imagine how lonely it would be without them". My dad nodded in agreement.
This is completely opposite to the way I am, and I'm not certain why. I am perfectly satisfied not seeing anyone at all and having no human contact for a month or more. Perhaps this makes me a bit of a hermit... if so, I don't really have a problem with that.
There is an older woman who lives on my street who, I believe, lives alone. She walks up the sidewalk in the evening, seemingly with great purpose, but the sidewalk ends just a few hundred meters on where the street itself terminates in an explosion of weeds. So she turns around, and comes back down with the same intensity. I once greeted her, but she ignored me, effortlessly. She doesn't look at me as she passes by.
My neighbors are an older couple. They spend little time together, and when they do, it seems pro forma. He mows, she gardens. He calls out to me occasionally, when I'm pulling clover out of my raised beds. "Hey neighbor!" he says, like Ned Flanders. I think he's forgotten my name, since I only introduced myself to him once. "How goes it?" he asks. I say something mildly despairing about slugs, and then ask him what they're growing in their own two raised garden beds. "Fuck, I don't know. That's Carolyn's shit, I don't care what it is, I just water the shit, she does whatever she does with it", he answers.
I don't have any issues with being alone. But I never, ever, want to be with someone that I treat like that.
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Since getting divorced, I have grown very fond of what I call ME TIME. I get cranky when I don't get enough of it and really relish being by myself. I've been in a relationship where I was treated like that and can say it's better to be alone.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely, Katie. I don't think that it's too much to ask to be treated with respect, and these days I have zero tolerance for others' casual disdain of my choices--be it my Me Time or anything else. When I'm alone in my garden, time shrinks into just Now and there are no expectations from anyone.
ReplyDeleteSomeone once told me "expectations are a wank". At the time I didn't know what wank meant and I thought a rough translation was "stupid". I now know it means to masturbate and that's really what they are - people pretending to care about other people but actually it's just a song and dance to cover up their own selfishness. I say bring it out in the open and celebrate both community and alone time. They're both awesome but the one ought not pretend to be the other.
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