Inside

When one is tired enough, moving outdoors seems a tremendous strain. To pull oneself from the ease and musk of darkened corridors, or a flesh-worn couch, is like the rush of standing up too fast. It’s so easy to become accustomed to being enclosed, to habitually avoid the unreliability of an outside world and favor the familiarity of small rooms. It’s inside that one drowns in a tired loneliness, devastatingly mistaken for comfort and familiarity.
Inside I am free, I bustle, I clean; I follow routines. It’s easy here, where I paint, brew tea, sit for stretching hours in front of windows, laze about. I absorb myself within myself, and tired thoughts escape me, shaped like fantastical dreams. I use daydreaming to escape into a distortion of the void that I avoid. Envisioning acts within scenes, I construct fantasies that could only be completed outside of my comfortable tiredness. Dreams are the substitute for the missing component to my life indoors, and I long for a distorted reality in the most longingly way: fantasy.
Loneliness is not a burden once you have acclimated to it. It is a quiet stomach after prolonged starvation; hunger subsided. Ultimately, it becomes something not far from satisfying and one is tempted to wallow in it like a pig’s face in a trough. And though the art of being lonely is perfected after time, there is one constant flaw, the flaw that lures you into a state of curiosity and perhaps even action, in some cases. It is that uncontrollable temptation to drift into fantasy.
I would often lie heavily on my loose bed sheets in the morning, after I’d waken. Still and quiet near an open window, I drowned in a pool of sounds: birds, buzzing insects, the loudness of mowers and the repetitive sound of lawn sprinklers. This was routine, obsessively so. My mind would quiet and focus, my concentration heightened. I was aware of what was happening, but drowned in that awareness until what was real became my fancy. A soft focus, a fuzz, came over my eyes and though open I couldn’t see. I would dive into a buffered realm of fantastical deviance, of fantastical social superiority and sensation. This would last briefly, just until I began to thaw back into the obvious solitude that surrounded me. The grind and hum of the mowers came into me first and lifted me up to the cackle of the sprinklers followed by a rush of all sounds, like blood, theatrically to my head until I became tired again raised my feet heavily off the mattress and to the calling floor.
Loneliness only provokes longing. Solitude provokes desire. In loneliness one can be content, peaceful, thoughtful and creative. One can experience heightened awareness, or a deeper self-awareness, but these states are always distorted. The absence of sociality stunts one’s person and reverses the process in which one became a social being to begin with. But loneliness is comfortable, and poses no immediate threat. It is not intimidating and does not hurt right away. And so to fall into it, like and insomniac eventually falls into slumber, is almost like a trap: a comfortable, familiar, bear-trap.