Returning to Myself
I'm not my favorite person to spend my time with.
Returning to myself is not just a lonely
but a painfully boring thing to do.
So much so that I'm actually not at all interested in doing it.
I prefer to double,
triple,
and quadruple down on codependency,
which I've come to
learn that outside of a 12-step program
or junior high school relationships isn't
really as unhealthy as we all may be thought.
For me the key to learning to be
alone is to not be alone at all.
It's being alone in a crowded room.
It's
hearing an unexpected doorbell ring and
wondering who has shown up to watch me
and read my book and bite my nails all day.
That a guest can be a deep lean-in over a
cheap bottle of wine or simply an eyebrow
raise and a gesture toward the refrigerator
while I play Zelda.
Where I totally choose myself with someone so close to me that I
can hear them relax.
People want to be together in silence more than we allow in our time.
It's falling deeply in love with car wheels on a gravel road.
The possibility of the visitor.
The not being aloneness of it all.
Togetherness has given me everything I love about being alive.
Starting with my original
family in a single wide mobile home gathered around a wood stove.
All the way to living
with my band and haunting my wife everywhere she goes.
Raising my kids on a tour bus and
learning at the feet of Joni Mitchell.
And making music with my greatest hero of all
time Elton John.
Why is it heroic to untether when
the tense work of togetherness is so
much more interesting?
It's because I don't want to do it.
Because I don't want to return
to myself.
And that's why I will.