I was betrayed, lied to and treated as an inconvenience.
I was so alone. I was just a little boy.
Alone now is a place of safety and satisfaction with solitude, like when I’m in my mind, driving the vehicle I use to get around this experience called life.
Sometimes, like after an accident, like a stroke for example, the vehicle requires a team of experts to regain mobility, the cost runs to millions and the time is measured in years.
Yet it is taken up, this burden of care, by a society I helped to build, based on the unconditional acceptance of the individual.
“God is healing you”, was one of the first abuses I experienced on the stroke ward seven years ago by a Catholic health care aid. “Where was the fucker when I had the stroke?” was my response. Her subsequent abandonment of me as a heretic was the next abuse.
I’m feeling fear of the future right now as I’m healing from an attack by a homeless man in need of the psychiatric treatment freely available in my country, resulting in a broken hip and arm. The outlook is favourable to return home after months and months in care. Recovering to my much prized solitude (there is no such thing, I am always with me). I feel fear that it might be taken away from me, an irrational concept of awfulness.
So solitude therefore means ‘uninterrupted time with myself’ according to me. According to Webster: Middle English solitude "the state of being alone," from early French solitude (same meaning), from Latin solitudin-, solitudo (same meaning), from solus "alone".
I used to hate being alone, it was tied up with fear of everything, especially the future. A result of abandonment as a child. Of course I was terrified of everything, I was just a little boy. Alone, with the whole world that I didn’t know how to deal with, that often abandonded me, not to mention lashed out at me.
How could I be an artist, musician, and writer if I was terrified of being alone and deeply ashamed and embarrassed of my fear? My predictions of the future were those of being judged and hated and a failure. Still, I saw music performances, read books and viewed art knowing that I could do better.
In the early days of chat rooms circa 1994, I met my needs (communication, companionship and sex), my ‘wife’ being unavailable as it turned out, chasing affairs with new exciting men and women. I used to create orgasms in women on the net simply with my words; “my tongue feels your clit slowly swelling inside my mouth.”
Because of not having parents, it was the psychologists who helped to instil a fundamental sense of well-being in me followed by my artist-teachers in a process that took years which is still continuing today.
I relate:
“I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would know
Asking only workman’s wages, I come looking for a job
But I get no offers
Just a come-on from the whores on 7th Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.
Then I'm laying out my winter clothes
And wishing I was gone, going home
Where the New York City winters aren't bleeding me
Leading me, going home
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains” — Paul Simon
