I'm only lonely when I'm alone.

I find that loneliness comes in waves that surge and break on the shore of my evenings before receding again for a time. The tide is low during the day, when I am too busy and distracted to be too bothered by distance. But high tide flows in most often on weeknights, when there is no one in my apartment but me, and I feel that all my friends are an impossibly long way away in both space and time. I am not used to being solitary for at least five nights a week; to be perfectly honest, I'm not used to being regularly solitary at all. This is the first time I've lived truly alone, without family or friends or roommates a stone's throw away.

I miss Tribe Rivendarth and our merry band of groupies as if a limb had been severed from my body.

I wonder if the insistent sameness of my too-quiet evenings will become cabin fever as time goes by. For now, at least, I find ways to preoccupy myself, though sometimes I acutely miss the presence of another person. I just don't want to get bogged down in routine.

Kowalski: Routine is the silent killer.
Fraser: I thought that was high blood pressure.
Kowalski: No, we changed that.
Fraser: When?
Kowlaski: When you were on vacation.

Perhaps more disheartening is the lack of closeness I feel with any of the friends I have made in Sonobe. I am growing very fond of my friends in Kyoto city, but can only see them on weekends. I know logically that this is the same jump I made in college, to new surroundings and strange people, but I think it was easier to make friends then, living together in a dorm and being forced to socialize in classes. Constant contact and necessity eventually bred some of the best friendships I have today. I wish there was some easy way to replicate that here! I suppose I'll continue to meet the Kyoto crowd whenever I can, and pick up a few hobbies for the empty hours.

I'm not without hope. I'm just adjusting.

blurring the lines

Wednesday evening I was out walking the streets of Sonobe, specifically along a darkish back lane that runs past a rice field. There was no one around, and the air was just perfectly cool and fresh. I looked up at the beautiful night sky, which was all a-glitter with autumn stars, and its expanse stretched away and away before me until my breath caught in my lungs and I felt that if I took off running, I could leap into the air and fly up into the heavens.

It was a giddy feeling, one that was almost convincing despite the laws of physics, and for a powerful moment I desperately wished that I was asleep and dreaming, because if it was a dream I surely could fly away like I wanted to. I thought my chest might burst with the bittersweet longing of a caged bird. It was simultaneously suffocating and invigorating.

This was the song I was listening to at the time. The beginning sounds of stars and bubbles and Little Nemo. But beyond that, you must listen to the whole thing to understand my perfect feeling of lift off, the liberating sprint down the starlit lane and the exact moment when sneakers leave pavement up into the blue-black-purple night.