uncompleted thoughts

loneliness and i are old friends. it's not that we like each other, it's not that we enjoy each other. no, but we're comfortable with each other. we let our hair down in the presence of each other, we let it all hang out. we quickly groove into old routines, old habits, like a well used machine that's just returned from the shop and is eager to once again perform its old function, move along its old and well-established, well-known orbit.

no, i don't especially like being alone, but i've had so much practice at it that i've built up whole frameworks of Dealing With It, which I had thought I could discard like outgrown underpants, but, like outgrown underpants, I kept locked in drawer for no particularly good or recognized reason, until one day, unexpectedly, I had reason to put them on again and find out that they fit just fine, after all, and weren't as worn out and stained as I'd seemed to remember them.

In the movie "Heat," which I almost watched this evening, but didn't, because I found the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" first, the De Niro character says, "I am alone, I am not lonely." It's clear from his acting (man, that guy can act, can't he?) that he's lying. And yet, he's not. His personal code of conduct keeps him perpetually alone, and, like me, his aloneness permeates his life to the point where he's become as comfortable with it as he is with his own skin. Comfortable is not the same as beloved, of course, and this is brilliantly portrayed in his simple statement.

Thinking thoughts is what I do best, and writing about them brings out more thoughts, and clarifies the ones that I've already managed to have, such as they may be. But now is not the time for writing, though I think the topic is important. Now is the time for bed, and the thoughts will have to remain void and unformed, a universe of realization unrealized, an analyzed reality unrecorded, until I once again have the right balance of sorrow, time, and rye to scale my walls and record how i really feel, for all the giant load of usefulness that brings.