“Alone, and yet alive! Oh, sepulchre! My soul is still my body’s prisoner!“—The Mikado
I can almost sense those who are spending this morning in a huff, still in bed
but refusing, today, to imagine what they sometimes do upon waking—a body beside them,
staring back, in the place they’ve kept vacant as faithfully as any commitment.
Even if, as happens sometimes beyond their control–like they expect love to happen—
they had woken up from one of those perfect dreams where they were loved
by someone worthy of loving them, today it wouldn’t be enough;
they wouldn’t greet the day in a smiling stupor of their little secret;
they would, instead, play the cynic who knows the magician has tucked the card away,
bitter to know the taste in their mouth was only their own tongue, sour from the morning.
But I was glad to be alone, because it was only alone that I would’ve remembered
the year we had performed The Mikado in high school, an excuse for us all
to dye our hair black and white our faces, and make a project sewing simple kimonos,
congratulating ourselves on an authenticity that, true, was about as authentic
as Gilbert and Sullivan had envisioned it, who still called it “the Orient.”
But what did we know, still in school, most of us having never left the state?
Of all the authenticity we had replicated, we were most convinced by the lovers,
two eleventh graders, whose depiction of romance rang true to us; that,
and the honest performance of the old maid–there’s always an old maid—
played for laughs by a senior girl, who howls the saddest song in the show,
and who had drawn old lady lines on her white makeup, and a fat black mole,
because loneliness, we assumed, couldn’t touch anyone truly good at heart.
And like most teenage wisdom, it was true in pieces: the loneliness we couldn’t imagine
arrived eventually, but what the maid’s song didn’t address was how loneliness,
on mornings like this, could feel as spacious and warm as an empty bed in winter:
alone, and yet alive, with a crisp morning on the other side of the window,
and a rare feeling of contentment brought on by nothing but the expected;
alone, and yet alive enough to sit in a quiet room, writing this down,
one cup of coffee already gone, and an operetta with words that came back to me
playing through headphones; and I’ll have another cup of coffee,
and maybe open the window without worry of who, besides me, will decide it’s too cold,
and then I’ll do what only the alone can do today
and ignore the world, certain that I’ll be unbothered by those who have each other,
and write a lazy poem without rhyme for nobody at all in particular.
Alone, and happy to remember that last night I dreamed I was alone, even there,
walking through a garden at dawn, with carrots growing above the soil,
so real that, on waking up, I could almost smell the pasture I knew had been nearby.
Goddfrey Hammit. 