Watch Your Head, Sweetheart

My life had fallen into two modes: at home by myself, or when I was going out. “Going out” also covered those extremely rare occasions when someone was coming to visit me. Then, “home” became a part of “out”, the way Kipling’s “They” became “a kind of ‘We’.” In my non-solitary mode, I would wash more thoroughly, make sure I was wearing clean clothes, &c. I definitely became a different person on those occasions, a little bit more like my former self.

I’d never lived alone before. Not this alone, anyway. I’d lived with my parents, or in a dormitory at college, or in barracks with a roommate in the Navy, or with my parents again, or with Kathe. I hoped this solitary life would end eventually, perhaps fairly soon. In the meantime, I was trying to embrace it as an opportunity to lead a different kind of life. Seeing as how I had no choice.

Turning it over in my mind, the only period in which I had slept alone night after night, with no way of reaching another person if I needed to, was during the couple of months that I had spent walking and hitch-hiking in a roundabout way from Virginia back to Oregon after getting out of the Navy. I hadn’t slept in the same spot from one night to the next, usually on the ground, in a sleeping bag with at most a tarp pulled over me. It was kind of unnerving if I gave it much thought, just how strange this solitary existence really was.

Everything was different. In the first few weeks, I’d been busy with moving things out of the storage lockers, consolidating them into one, putting the rest in the storage space of the apartment building, or piling boxes up “temporarily” in the apartment, without having to worry how Kathe would feel surrounded by all of them. Removing the rugs from storage, I decided for myself, without having to consult anyone, that I would lay most of them out overlapping on the carpeting. Then the lockdown began, and I went out rarely, at intervals of days. The boxes have stayed where they are for now, awaiting my decision to carry them up to the storage space, or to discard them. I could go through the boxes here in my solitude, or not. There’s no rush.

The time runs out, and the host reads from the poem that contains the line that made me think of Kathe, her presence and her absence:

https://www.rattle.com/pride-by-diana-goetsch/

Diana Goetsch says, “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” 

So I think, was that your mission, Kathe? To redeem something as hard to reach as me? Alone, I have to answer for myself, and remind myself that Kathe always liked me, and respected me, more than I did myself. When we were having our worst times, she could get beautifully fierce with her desire to reach me as I withdrew from her.

I’m so grateful to you for all you did for me, Kathe. If you had died twenty years ago, or even ten, I would not have been able to survive on my own as well as I have. Your love made me strong enough to be able to live without it.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are going to meet someone. Not a stranger."