To be alone again in the thick skin of this low-slung bungalow house, August overcast and waning, windows open to the breathings of the distant interstate passing, you and the kids on some errand, no note on the kitchen counter, the workday done, my computer on and waiting, I feel so helpless against a tide of emotion I can only identify as a melancholy joy. When I was a boy come home from school to the farm alone, my father working, my mom with my sister to a lesson or something, I would pass through all the rooms in a daze, lingering, gazing in all the mirrors, lying down on all the beds, trying myself on for size in every doorway, every hall. Or I would wander the farm itself, the lawns, the lanes, the fields. There was no highway there to trouble the sound of being alone. The only noise was wind if there was wind, or plane if overhead a plane. I didn’t know it then, but we lived beneath the pattern of flights from MSP International to points northeast and pan-Atlantic, and though they were so far up in the air, their thin roar glimmered in your ears if you strained hard to hear. It never occurred to me that one day I’d be tired of flying. That the thrill of passing again over my own hometown would finally be lost on me. Looking back on that clueless boy, I pity him for who he became. For isn’t there something lonely about a life that wasn’t in the least foreseen? I live in someone else’s city, in someone else’s house, it seems. It’s as if one day I stumbled into a giant jumble sale of dreams, and left with my arms loaded, caring only that I got some good bargains. I’m not saying I don’t love my life. Your heart and this city and this house are the only places I can imagine belonging. But isn’t that just it? In, through the screens of our lives, the song of the world outside comes thronging in all its unexpected discord. And we call that chaos home, despite everything we love.
Todd Boss, To be alone again in the thick skin (in ‘Yellowrocket’, Norton 2008)
