Protecting the Territory of Solitude in a Busy Home

It’s five o’clock in the morning, and I descend down the stairs before sunrise to find the evidence of last night’s St. Paddy’s Day soiree.   On the couch, my cousin Ryan is covered head to toe in a blanket — he evidently decided not to drive home after all.   Upstairs, the house is filled with more sleeping bodies.  Nestled like sardines in Miss. S’s full bed, are four little girls — two at the head and two at the foot.   In their own rooms, Paddy, Sina, and Bal are each wrapped up within their blankets and dreams. 

William Henry Hunt's
Girl Reading By Lamplight

I stealthily pick my way around the eight pair of brightly colored shoes and rubber boots that S and her friends have left scattered like flower seed, wondering how four girls could produce twice as many shoes as they need.  I pass through the kitchen and see the trivia game, the dishes, everything has been left in medias res — the room is neither clean nor dirty, but, left well, in the middle of things. In the next room, near the closet where they actually belong, school bags mope on the floor, slumped over in despair of the weekend.  I ignore their self-pity and find my way to my desk.  A small circle of light floods the space as I turn on the lamp, illuminating the darkness.

It is my favorite part of day, these few moments of solitude. 

It is my favorite time of life, wading through the chaos that has got me here.

In a poem titled “Crooked Prayer,” April Lindner celebrates the dual impulses of wanting to both inhabit one’s natural landscapes of solitude and to ride the visceral eddies created by living:

Please don’t give me, Lord, the thing I covet:

silence silken as a candleflame,

or blank and pregnant as the moon

on which I might imagine any face

or none.  Resist my wish

for cool white walls, windows flung open,

the afternoon hush edged with birdsong.

give me again and again

this rattle of wind-spun trashcans,

the schoolbus with its screechy brakes,

two dogs poised at the sill to listen

and bay back their urgent wisdom.

teach me to see unmade beds,

fruit torn into and abandoned,

pith and rind, as hungers

satisfied, to look in cracks

for what I step, unseeing, over:

rice grains, spilled beads, a lost needle, a burr,

and dust balls spun of nothing but nostalgia

of shed skin for a body, any body.[1]

I keep this poem posted on my refrigerator, atop the weathered fundraiser forms, earmarked school calendars and release forms, party invitations and coupons.  Linder’s prayer is a touchstone for me, not for the way in which it ultimately moralizes against loneliness, but because within it I find the language to honor both a natural impulse to craft a space for my own solitude, to make it its own territory within the strangely wonderful disorderliness of this home, and the lives lived therein.  

[1] Ascent Poetry Magazine, September 2010

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