How to Be Alone: a poem with music and video

Combating #SundaySadness

Favorite quote: “Lonely is healing, if you make it.”

HOW TO BE ALONE by Tanya Davis

If you are at first lonely, be patient. If
you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then
just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We
could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the
library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine
fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books.
You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There’s also
the gym. If you’re shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could
put headphones in (guitar stroke).

And there’s public transportation,
because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and meditation. No
one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and
salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously (electric guitar
plucking) based on your avoid being alone principals.

The lunch counter.
Where you will be surrounded by chow-downers. Employees who only have an hour
and their spouses work across town and so they — like you — will be
alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you
are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner. A
restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less intriguing a person when
you’re eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your
finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you
were.

Go to the movies. Where it is dark and soothing. Alone in your seat
amidst a fleeting community.

And then, take yourself out dancing to a club
where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights
convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s
watching…because, they’re probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with
best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all,
gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating, and beads of perspiration
remind you of life’s best things, down your back like a brook of
blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch
for you.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there’re always statues
to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if
only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations
you get in by sitting alone on benches might’ve never happened had you not been
there by yourself

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are
wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while,
nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless
and lonely is healing if you make it.

You could stand, swathed by groups
and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther for the
endless quest for company. But no one’s in your head and by the time you
translate your thoughts, some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just
kept.

Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy
slogans from preschool over to high school’s groaning were tokens for holding
the lonely at bay. Cuz if you’re happy in your head than solitude is blessed and
alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you. All experience is
unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be
relieved, keeps things interesting life’s magic things in reach.

And it
doesn’t mean you’re not connected, that community is not present, just take the
perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of
it. take silence and respect it. if you have an art that needs a practice, stop
neglecting it. if your family doesn’t get you, or religious sect is not meant
for you, don’t obsess about it.

you could be in an instant surrounded if
you needed it
If your heart is bleeding make the best of it
There is heat
in freezing, be a testament.

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