Just Another Wednesday Night...

I have created a character for a poem series. She is known simply as "The Hapless Spinster." I suppose she's a take-off on any number of single women in their early 30s depicted more and less successfully in literature and film. An amalgam. I understand the temptation some of you may have to think of her as me. She and I have some things in common, to be sure, but her voice is distinctly different from mine. She's much more low-brow and doesn't like to put on airs, which I have to cop to liking to put on, at least occassionally.

The Hapless Spinster would call this "just another Wednesday night." I was tempted to title this post "Negotiating Loneliness." I assure you. I am not having an identity crisis...it was just to illustrate the point.

I feel a degree of success in having even attempted a character series by way of poetry. It's one of the specific ways the cross-pollination of poetry and fiction that I have sought to privilege as part of my grad school education bears fruit in my own writing.

Anyway, when I say "loneliness," I don't want you to envision someone moping while eating chocolate with the television permanently on the Lifetime (Television for Women) channel, hoping for a better life. The picture of loneliness is far less pedantic than that. Even ironically, unlonely looking.

It's one woman (in my case) who is happy with her job, finally feels like she's coming into her own, has made as much peace as possible with her regrets... who laughs a lot these days, who has a respectful social life (though not a romantic one, specifically, at this point), who is good at her job, and has far less to apologize for than she thought she did. Loneliness is not simply the desire to have romance. It's the understanding that the Bible has it right when it says "two are better than one...if two lie down together they can keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone?"

You've heard me say this before. I like my space. a lot. But I also love the thought of someone wanting to draw near. This is a want I've learned to negotiate in the absence of fulfillment of that want. I don't feel sorry for myself, but I can acknowledge that on some Wednesday nights, here and there, I think of a scenario if which I tell someone in particular all about my day. Someone who wants to hear about it.

There are times when I am painfully aware of the help I don't have by virtue of being single. I do all the heavy lifting in my life, and while I do look forward to a consuming passion someday, sometimes it's just about wishing someone was there to help me get the groceries inside.