poem is love

“We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there. There’s also the gym. If you’re shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could put headphones in. And there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places. And there’s prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation. Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid-being-alone principals.

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school’s groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Because if you’re happy in your head then solitude is blessed and alone is okay.

And it doesn’t mean you’re not connected, that community’s not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. Take silence and respect it. If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. If your family doesn’t get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

You could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it.

If your heart is bleeding make the best of it."

HOW TO BE ALONE a poem by Tanya Davis