ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY

I thought I’d be going out of my mind here at the end of the Cape in the dead of winter. The boyfriend has returned to academic duties; the tourists are non-existent; there are only a handful of restaurants open; and the cold is bitter. But walking the beagle tonight, it was hard not to hear the stillness. Not a car in earshot; no-one on the streets; most of the stores boarded up; the same handful of people at the gym each evening. In most places, you never hear silence like this, let alone live in it day after day. Some days, I must speak to a mere five or six people. And at night, this old house I’m subletting groans with the expanding water-pipes, its shutters banging against shingles in the wind. One room, I’m convinced, is haunted. Even the beagle won’t sleep there – and she’ll happily sleep almost anywhere. Only a block away, a couple of nor-easters have had their way with the beach; the tides have been huge, sweeping completely underneath my summer wharf-home, carving new little valleys around the wooden pilings in the sand. The beagle won’t even venture out of the dunegrass in the wind in this weather, with the sand blasting her little face, and the wind blowing her ears out like sails. But it’s a great break from urban routine. The blog makes me feel as if I’m in the middle of things – the hundreds of emails chatter back at me each day as if I were still in D.C. But the rest of the day is formless – reading books, working on an essay, throwing myself into intense work-outs, eating microwave popcorn and re-heated frozen food in front of a wood fire each night, occasionally visiting a friend for supper. The solitude, in other words, has yet to become loneliness. And the quiet slowly becomes a narcotic, wrapping itself around you until you can’t imagine hearing anything more. This is the way we all used to live long ago, isn’t it? Maybe when we could hear ourselves think.