ruminations vol 1: solitude

perfectionism defeated for one day only

i have never connected to a political articulation or theory of feeling and experience as i have with gabriel garcia márquez’s concept of “solitude”. the word “connected” hardly does it any kind of justice. it echoes in dimensions far beyond the marxist concept of “alienation” to which it is related, dwarfed by the phenomenology that márquez commanded. solitude is alive. it is dynamic. it is a force that invades the psyche and billows out, coloring everything in its path. the answers to some of my deepest questions and anxieties lie at the end of its unceremoniously melancholic grasp. i sit in bed on a saturday morning gripped by it. i long for answers of what to do cast in its bright shadow. i mourn the ones i used to know in its arms, and it collects the tears i have yet to cry.

i look at the walls of my room, the corridors of my memory, the expanse of everything known to me surrounding me, and i feel its touch. it is the reality i sit with in my quietest moments. the anxiety and deep discomfort i seek to dispel with every productive or social activity. the phantom in the closet that defines the self but from which one is always running. i fear nothing more than the “honorable pact” made with it that tears the connections in my chest as i see and feel its face in the reflection of my own. as it stalks from the cover of the refusal of love and understanding from my family. from the insidiously dubious degradation of my own relationships. it holds all the answers, yet sleeps ominously in the darkest corners of my mind and soul, waiting to taunt me with my own simultaneous understanding and inaction.

i cannot properly express the strange, elusive existential evocations of cien años de soledad, rendered unpretentious by the viscerality of its blurring of the real and the emotional. i cannot describe the deep sene of pause its last page made me feel without the vague emotional gesture to a phenomenon i struggle to describe. but it has always stuck with me. from the things i see in myself, in my brother, things which i project onto those i hold dear, seeing if the reflection of solitude stares back, equally terrified by its image or lack thereof. do they feel it too? the same way as i have? is this universalization my own naïveté, a sheltered misapplication of what i believe i understand? what even is this beast, nay, the sleeping haunt whose malaise is pervasive yet inexplicable, that is fundamental yet so foreign? my academic language, my attempts to articulate the feelings i desperately wish to understand, are no match for this task, rendered nought, pathetically crumpling. my chance encounters with it, as it stares and burns its image into my soul, disappearing in a flash, cast away by the convoluted churning of my thoughts and emotions as nonchalantly as it appeared.

one day i’ll put pen to paper, armed with the weapon necessary to clear these feelings. for now, i listen to the fan, stare at points in my room with the blinds closed, at peace with the concept i have been quietly obsessed with. yet, i still have armed myself against the one thing more harrowing than my knowledge of it; losing that knowledge, falling to the ignorance and complacency of an alliance with it. i have become a content yet paranoid prisoner in my own bed, the space in which these feelings dance and come to life, creating the state from whence the form of solitude manifests itself. i will observe their shanty in silence, the ballet of my anxieties puppeteered by this old friend of solitude, the color and shape of their movements instructing me on the meaning of the world, and the lack thereof. perhaps, in finally writing, i have already begun to understand. each word on the page illuminates the truth like watercolor falling on canvas, the ink breathing a calm life into the void, as i clutch the shotgun of my will ever closer to my chest.