Home Alone: thoughts on the writing life

February has just slipped out from under me, and I know sooner or later I will have to leave the house.

Sure, I’m anticipating long and curious city walks in spring’s fuzzy glow. I’m dying for midnight coffees near Bloor and Brunswick, where the conversations of the assorted revelers nearby fill my notebooks. I want to be a lady who lunches, to go someplace with Elle and our girls, to pound them back and show off our vintage clutches. Oh, yes. I can feel the thaw. I will even go dancing, I’ll wear red lipstick and a smudged mole. I could definitely enjoy something with the banjo tonight, or something with gin.

But it’s still freezing, and so it didn’t take much persuasion for me to commit to another evening home alone. The truth be told, this all by myself stuff is spectacular. This past winter has been paradise. Like most people, urban home solitude is an expensive commodity, and I’ve always had roommates. I’ve lived with the fabulous and the fey, I’ve lived with thieves and vampires, I’ve lived with people whose name or face I might not recall upon passing. I’ve lived with lovers, with squatters, with addicts and mental patients and freaks of every assortment, with senior citizens and junkies and crazy Indians. I’ve lived with the elfin, the initiated, the converted evangels, the con men. With hippies, and the pierced and the prodded and the brilliant and the travelers. I lived with prison types and with festive fags of every stripe.

And I tell you, from the banker to the monk, human beings, each in their own way, are stunningly insane.

Those who know me know I love nothing more than a crazy person, and that I use the word so liberally it’s annoying. I love people. I love crazy people. I love being a crazy brilliant writer in the big city. But in my ascent to nearly middle age, that proverbial hill that shortly I’ll be over, I’ve finally found living arrangements on my own. It’s pretty nuts, I’m telling you, because all I do is write. It’s like I’ve been waiting for this winter my whole life and didn’t know it. I’m downloading, and it’s coming through my fingertips into the keyboard.

It doesn’t matter tonight that all week long except for Thursday when I had a root canal I did nothing but write furiously and endlessly- that’s still exactly what I feel like doing tonight. Dinah Washington’s elixir diction and bell-clear blues swerve sensually through my brainwaves. I just popped open some French Cross, the cheapest pink wine I could find. There’s salami and oranges. This is luxury. My girl Maeve described it best: she said that you can’t always be spilling open and over but you have to be there if the muse appears. You had to coax it, provide it with a portal. If you were out in the middle of a crowded subway or a nightclub, you might not hear her.

Seems it works. Close the door, pour a glass, the floods rush through me. I ride the crest of that surge of confidence, that thrill in life that can only come from a sense of your work, of your contribution. It’s still tempered with its see-sawing worldview, the one that forgets potentiality and experiences fear instead. Of what possible self-indulgent use could a bunch of poetry about my weird moments possibly be to anyone else on this planet?

That’s why famous writer Ariel Gore reminded me about William Carlos Williams said: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net
order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife, through indigo or amazon online