Who Are You?

You don't ring my bell. You walk past my door. Your pace is sure, your purpose unknown, your own business minded. Neither love nor hate is received or given. Yours is just a life like mine….we are ships passing one another, day or night. Sunshine makes no difference in this large frenetic city. This goes on and on until one and then both of us become ill and eventually cease living. There is no harm, no joy, no great understanding. We have our lives, presumably our own support systems of family and friends or at least "gemeinschaft" contacts that interrupt our isolation. What would an extended hand mean? Why bother someone who is a total stranger? Ancient ways of smiling courteously are not against any law. And yet we stay our hand, mute ourselves and avoid a gaze. There's much to recommend privacy. The inclination towards it is immediately sensed and respected. The gregarious ways can so often disappoint and breed, if not contempt, then a pleasantness that soon teaches that it has no future. Silence has a neutral charge, but it can go in either direction: to a self-absorbed world neither cruel nor Christian, or to one of days in a self-imposed hermitage where self-loathing proudly suffers its infliction of pain on no one else.

Who are you, really? I will never know because I have chosen the path of fear that somehow comforts. You may have wisdom to impart. My prejudices may be proven wrong. Certainly at least one pleasant surprise is possible from making your acquaintance. My other face appears on occasion. But trust and learning are not what I seek now. Too many years of railing and marking my territory like an old tiger who won't indulge an upstart former cub. Who are you? You are me and you will fulfill my expectations be they good or bad. You will behave according to my beliefs. The choice is mine if I wish to engage you. Aloneness is not loneliness of course. When the latter grows stronger than the former, my mind may create connections and bridges to you. And yet, Solitude is a friend already in my home, still golden, the other only potentially just silver. Does heaven have rooms where one may be alone and lock the door?