Solitude.

Solitude means tilting back and saying anything to the ceiling, means taking inventory of yourself, prodding out the weak spots and mending yourself like a sock, peeling at all those other skins until you’re nothing but bones and stories. Being alone means finding some grain of ambition, some little coal of desire underneath all your ropey necessities and habits, slicing down to the tiny thing that makes you open your eyes in the morning, makes you go into the world despite all the things that scare you, despite that feeling that you will be found out, that those weak spots are bleeding into the water, despite the daily inundation of dread, despite the heaviness of wearing skin thick enough for other to see and feel you, despite having to exist as a series of arbitrary facts and figures that are irrelevant to the boiled down jelly of your essence.

Solitude means answering that ominous knock that comes in the midnight of your unconscious, means listening to the wavering decibels of your own voice; being alone means you don’t have to hold yourself in contrast to the other, to scrutinize the purple flaws of your skin and the achy gaps in your character, to count the lapses of judgment accumulated in your history, which you wear all across your shoulders, tangled in your hair. Instead, being alone means letting all the events of your past, all your loud regrets rest, simply exist in stillness, factual and whole and okay.