Avoidance

by

November 7, 2005

At some point, I’m going to have to leave this apartment. 

But not just yet.

I’ve always been a loner despite the fact that I am exceedingly social at work.  There, I make friends with everyone.  But when I get home and lock the door, my ambition to go out and get a life dissolves. 

Take this weekend for example.  Apart from venturing out to get some cream for coffee and some cat food, I didn’t even get dressed.  I gorged on Yeats (“How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”), wrote, listened to Oasis at concert volume, ate my meals straight out of the can and danced around in my underwear with wild abandon at 3 in the morning. 

It was heaven.

This is par for the course but lately I am beginning to get vaguely worried about what leading a life of such isolation might be doing to my psyche.  This has been a cause of intermittent concern to me so I stop every six months or so and do an accounting. 

So far, so good – I think.  I’m starting to feel faint stirrings of wanting something more, but until I work out what that might be, I’m locked up here as securely as the princess in the tower. I don’t feel I can complain about that – after all, I’m the one who threw away the key.  I know it’s made me eccentric (but I’m going to blame that on my artist’s soul) and I suspect it’s made me more anxious – but I think it has also made me a better writer and that’s a sacrifice I’ll willingly make.

My mother asked me the other day if I was lonely.  I couldn’t answer her, because I couldn’t tell.  Sometimes I am I guess, but having such a pathological drive towards solitude mitigates it.

I don’t even know why I shut myself away so resolutely but the compulsion to do so is stronger than hunger.  I can’t work out what I get from this though I do have some insight into what scares me about the Great Out There.  Solitude is sanctuary.

But lately, dissatisfaction is drifting in like smoke insinuating itself beneath a door.  I think I hear someone calling me, but I can’t tell where the voice is coming from.  I don’t know whose voice it is either – or even if I would recognize it if it were my own.

Some parts of my life are enormously satisfying at the moment: others are places of complete desolation (but I can’t look at those yet). 

The drive to be alone has always been a governing force in my life and I’m at my most creative when I immerse myself in music and just think.  All sorts of epiphanies I haven’t earned come to me, and if that spark is there, I am able weave them into words.  When that happens, nothing comes close to it.

But is it good for me?

My mother is of the opinion that no woman’s life is complete without a man.  I think that’s absolute nonsense but lately I’m beginning to feel that it might be nice to wake up to somebody one of these days, though not necessarily for long. (See accompanying column on Lust.) 

Damn this Catholic upbringing!  I’m too straitlaced to succumb to the lures of casual sex and I don’t want a relationship.  Back in the mists of time (i.e. when I was gullible enough to believe it) having a man tell me that he loved me was a wonderful thing.  These days, I don’t trust it.  The thought scares the hell out of me.  I never want to be that vulnerable, that exposed to another person again as long as I live. 

I’ll be fine sitting here in the corner polishing my armour, thank you very much.

In romance, my fatal flaw – and my salvation -- has been my inability and unwillingness to expose my heart to somebody who already has access to my body.  It’s one or the other (though it’s invariably neither) -- both are inherently rife with risk and danger. It’s hard enough for me to relax into one of the above – both of them simultaneously incite an overwhelming sense of panic in me.  The safest course is to surrender neither.

I have relationships of enormous sweetness and devotion with a few of my male friends, but making those relationships sexual is out of the question.  I trust them already; I’ve fitted them into a frame of reference and care too deeply about them to spoil it all by introducing sex into the equation.  No exceptions.

I pretend it’s about preserving the longevity of the friendship but deep down I suspect it’s really about fear. 

(Here is the ruthless streak in me made manifest.)

As for the other – well, I wish human females were like praying mantises and were able to consume our swains after mating.  I get extremely twitchy at the thought of leaving someone out there that had seen me so defenceless, so immolated -- someone who might want more from me than I am prepared to give.  That maybe I’ll ever be prepared to give. 

It’s easier just to avoid the whole enterprise.  I don’t need to experience it firsthand – I’ve always been able to go everywhere in my own head and this is no exception. 

It’s enough.

For now.

Till next time,

Morrigan