There is a problem that occurs in the head when you go too long alone. When you go too long without using your voice. Not the way you talk to your dog, but the way you talk to another person in what is called relating.
This weekend I have spoken a hello to my old neighbor at the grocery store on Friday night. I spoke to the cashier at Food Lion and the cashier at the liquor store when I was picking up some vodka. Yesterday, I spoke to my neighbor as he called to me over the fence "Hello, any news on the jobs?" and to another neighbor when he got home from work and asked me if I knew of any jobs for his wife. Or was that Saturday? Also yesterday I spoke to the mailman when he whistled at me in jest when he saw me laying in my bikini top reading Hemingway in the backyard. I also spoke on the phone to my mom yesterday for about 30 minutes.
So my relating over the course of a whole weekend can be boiled down to this: a total of three minutes, perhaps, communications with acquaintances, and 30 minutes to my mother. So thirty three minutes of this weekend in conversation. Not much.
So it is no wonder my head feels very full and very stuffed and a bit dense with fog. None of my thoughts are being expressed and they're all piling up on one another in a very jumbled up way. The real thoughts and the small idle thoughts all piling up together so I don't know what are real thoughts and what are idle. It's a strange feeling when your head gets so disorganized from lack of thought-expression.
I felt lonely when I was dating Jay but in a different way. With Jay it was lonely because I had conversation but no depth of expression. Conversation was about dinner and what movie to watch and some complaining about work and general discontent with life. But nothing with any more depth so it was lonely in that false shallow way you feel when you're close to somoene and you have an expectation of emotional closeness but it doesn't happen.
I remember in college always being suspicious of the psychology majors. Psychology is fascinating but it doesn't require getting a degree in it to learn about it. When I have had psychological problems I have gone to the library or the Amazon store and gotten books and read until I worked out the problem. But some people go to the extreme of devoting their college studies to it and these people must have a much larger psychological problem than I have ever dealt with that they feel the need to study four years of it.
I think in the same way Jay must have chosen English as a major in order to work out his problems of expression. You'd think someone who had studied language, human character in books, and spent years writing would be a good expressor. But Jay didn't like to talk about anything deeper than work problems or complain about his parents. He gave me about 30% of himself. He did not relate to me. I asked and aked him to open up to me and to relate to me but he never did. He was all inside himself and didn't express anything.
I love perfume and Jay knew that. I would wear a new perfume with him and tell him about it and he never had a word to say. He never asked me a question about my hobby or about the perfume I was wearing even though I implored him to show interest. And he never did. I wore Chanel No. 19 when we went to see Neko Case together but I think by that point I was too tired of trying to get him interested in it to tell him what I was wearing or why I had picked that one to wear. I wore Bois des Iles when we were in Frankfort walking around at the capitol building and the cemetery but by that point I had surely stopped trying to get him to be interested in that stuff. Wearing Bois des Iles still smells like walking around Frankfort with Jay and I will proably always, or at least for a long time, remember that. But he never asked me.
A few times, I told him that he never asked me any questions and that made me feel like he didn't care about me. He didn't understand. He said why should he ask questions about me - none of that mattered because he loved me. This made me feel very lonely. I wonder if that was his way of training me like a Pavlov dog not to ask him any questions. If he could make me think he didn't care about learning about me, maybe I wouldn't want to learn about him. But that is not how I'm wired and as much as I tried to learn about him and get him to open up he never would.
Except for one time, really. We were driving back from Kentucky and I was driving and I asked him to tell me about his growing up. He told me all sorts of things. About being awkward in early high school and then becoming a runner and then making friends and starting to be popular. About some very painful experiences that I believe still haunt him. After he opened up on all of that it was like he was embarrassed and drew inside himself again and wanted me to act like it never happened.
That was in November and we broke up on January 1st and I still miss him every day. I am not sure what I miss, though. He was broken inside and although he studied English for four years he never solved his problem of expression.
It is very lonely for me in Wilson. There isn't really much here for single people, or academics, or any type of counterculture. You can go to the library but nobody in the fiction stacks you'd want to strike up a conversation with and upstairs in the nonfiction there is the computer lounge where the poor blacks to go get on the internet or sit at tables and stare at space. I am not kidding about this last part. Last time I was there a man was sitting at a table with his backpack on the table just staring at space. He sat like that the entire time I was in the nonfiction stacks. And the time before that I was at the library in the nonfiction stacks a big black man followed me around and then approached me and commented on my looks and gave me his phone number. The library is really not a friendly place for a single girl who is looking for either books or friends.
There is a Starbucks here but that is less friendly than the library. The baristas are ill-tempered or even worse, they make no conversation at all. It is a very cold Starbucks and service is very bad. The last time I tried to sit outside there was a rich white man who kept trying to talk to me and would not leave me alone to read. I never sat outside at Starbucks again because he gave me a very creepy vibe like his intentions were less than wholesome. Then another time I went to Starbucks I was wearing Infusion d'Iris and he was sitting at an outside table smoking when I walked in. When I came out, he asked what perfume I was wearing. I think I told him "Prada" and walked away and got in my car as quickly as I could. So Starbucks is not a friendly place, either.
There are a couple bars you can go to, but these are filled with young rich people who are trying to seem important and rich. They all wear the same types of clothes. The men are dressed in khakis with shirts tucked in and have Ken (of Barbie and Ken) hair and they always have on some sot of loafer or boat shoe. The women are always dressed in resort attire and always have a full face of makeup and have professionally colored hair and always have their nails conspicuously done. You cannot go to one of the bars and try to socialize with these people because when you are like me and don't wear resort or have a professional set of nails they don't want to talk to you. You are like a plague on their little Stepford style social life.
There is one other bar but it is filled with the bottom feeders. These are lifestyle alcoholics, middle aged men who come every night to buy young girls shots. The women at these bars look like they have been rode hard and put up wet, to use one of the local phrases. One time I was outside at this bar and was hit on very strongly by a lesbian. Not a cool lesbian like I am friends with at home, the ones with dreadlocks who ride bikes everywhere and are cool and are friends with everyone. This lesbian was sort of dirty looking and not one I would have wanted to be friends with.
And that is about it. There is a farmers market on the library lawn but it is on Wednesday mornings and I am at work on Wednesday mornings.
There are interesting things to do if you drive into Raleigh or Carrboro or Durham. I met a guy at a contra dance a year ago and we went on a couple of dates and then he moved to California. And then came Jay and the time that was lonely but for another reason.
So now I am trying to get through this loneliness and this time spent with my thoughts jumbling up on each other because I have no one to express them to. I need to start writing again and observing people and places like I used to. My imagination cannot be all gone. It has just been sleeping a while and I am hoping that by writing again it will begin to wake up. Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls talks about being gloomy and then realizing it has been a long time since he has made a joke with himself, so he makes a joke with himself and then feels better.
So it is my job to look for the jokes. I can combat loneliness with humor and writing and with my dog and cats and books. I am lonely now but it won't last and that is what I will keep telling myself until I am not lonely anymore.
