I have the window open wide, just to the left of me as I write. The wind plays in the trees and the air is heavy with the scent of mountains and earth. I can feel late Spring reaching toward Summer.
I have the window open to keep me company. Today I am lonely.
The writing life lore tells us writers are loners, and the fear of loneliness keeps some good people from writing. I am a loner and always have been since childhood. I love spending time with people, but I can also be a happy hermit, and usually I am never lonely.
For me, writing is a way of reaching out to others, to people I don't know. I sit alone, in silence, but all that time I’m out there, connecting with whoever reads my words.
Yet for the past week I have been feeling like poor me, I must sit down all alone and write.
In the days since completing the revisions on my new memoir and returning the final draft to my publisher, instead of writing I have been reading with wild abandon.
For me the characters in my favorite books are my friends. Relationships I think about long after I finish reading the book. My most loved books leave me feeling the author had invited me over for a long chat at her kitchen table. I favor memoirs so intimate I feel myself leaning over the shoulder of the writer, feeling her thoughts and sneaking into her life.
I like books I can’t put down. But when I reach the last chapter, I turn the pages slowly because I don’t want the story to end.
Thinking about the characters in my favorite books opened the window wider for me, and I found the root cause of my newfound loneliness. I miss spending time with the characters in the book I have recently finished writing.
Every day for the last few years, while writing, I have had intimate chats and spent long hours wandering back over time with Marie, Ann, Mary Lou and Irene.
Back in those days I drank Dr. Pepper so I could keep up with Irene, dancing long after the moon was full, wearing moccasins beaded in colors of sunrise, clouds and blue skies, her buckskin dress swaying. Irene danced the powwow competitions, Women’s Buckskin style, Northern, in the Golden Age category. At seventy-five with her tight jeans, blue-black hair and flirty personality Irene reminded me so much of my aunt Jo, I had to keep reminding myself that she wasn’t my aunt Josephine.
I miss the flow of these women in my life. I miss the way they made me laugh, and told me the truth even when it was hard for me to listen. And when I wasn’t with my women friends, the ones with the grandmother faces, walking the seven ways, I was with Bill again, and with my best friend Luke.
Each time I sat down to write, I brought them all back, made them all come alive again with my stories. For this reason, I will say that the writing life is proof against loneliness. Reading and writing is a healing medicine for loneliness. It is an act of connection, first to ourselves and then to others.
We sit alone in silence reading and writing, but all that time we are out there, falling in love, crying and laughing together and connecting with words.
