Reading Breeds Writing ... Breeds Loneliness

I woke up four times last night with new sentences for a chapter in my book of personal essays swimming in my head and was actually compelled to write them down. Thanks, Kindle, for making me read again, because this is what happens: I start working when I sleep again, which is ideal when I have too much work to do while I'm awake to get everything done.

Last night, I finally finished Sloane Crosley's second book How Did You Get This Number. It was less raucously, unabashedly, un-sadly funny than the first, but I still laughed out loud repeatedly. However, the last chapter about a lengthy, deceitful and in the end, horribly lonely-making relationship (that started over whiskey and a shared brain, as all my big and small ones have since I moved to this horribly lovelorn city) made my heart hurt. And, yes, I cried.

The last time a book made me cry was maybe one of the Anne of Green Gables books (Anne of Avonlea, to be exact, I think), and it was out of happiness that Gilbert and Anne got together. This one made me cry because I related on such a deep level, and it confirmed the feeling I was having that I hadn't been able to put my finger on until the last few pages of the book: when you write for a living -- particularly when you're over-analytical, over-psychological when it comes to analyzing other humans and your experiences, which makes for the best writing anyway -- you may just be destined for a sad and lonely existence. Thankfully, that existence might be extremely funny. But it will be so unspeakably sad at times that you won't want to leave your house. And when you are particularly over-diligent and really, really serious about your craft, you might not even notice you're creating your own loneliness, or that it's necessary to feel it in order for you to spend the hours upon hours of inside time toiling to produce some brief moments of human beauty. There was a sadness and a heaviness about her book, and I know it well. It often makes me uncomfortable because I think if I met myself on the street in my deepest woe-is-me, crying-my-eyes-out (or even just so-numb-I-no-longer-have-any-eyes-to-cry-out) moments, I would be the most unlikable character I'd ever read. I would make myself uncomfortable.

And as much as, when life and love lets me down (and I don't think I can do it ever, ever again, because "this time" was as close as I can ever hope to get [cue my "Island of Almost Boyfriends" song, because they just keep getting closer and closer to being real and not "almost," to the point where sometimes I don't think they could possibly get any closer and that it must just be me and my own problems that are keeping me alone]), I want to give it all up and stay inside forever, I know the following truth she writes:

"One mathematically insignificant day, you stop hoping for happiness and become actually happy. Okay, on occasion, you do worry about yourself. You worry about what this experience has tapped into. What will be left of it when the surface area shrinks? How will you make sense of it after the compulsion to have others make sense of it for you has faded? There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you the worst day of your life wasn't in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn't in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that's not such a bad thing."