Dear Pogue,

I felt compelled to write to you today to explain something that you will not have understood. You see, you invited me to dinner yesterday and I declined the invite. First, let me affirm that you are a marvellous cook and my turning down of the invitation had nothing to do with your cooking. Then, I enjoy your company, so it is not about you, believe me.

It’s all about me and at the moment I just have a desire to be at home, ideally just your mother and me. I am feeling a deep desire for alone time, for space, for no demands on me and it’s a real deep feeling. I don’t know if you’ll understand and I don’t know if I can explain it but I seem to have been giving myself to somebody else or somewhere else for quite sometime now and I’ve run out of the energy that fuels that. I love my own company and solitude, those things seeming to have been absent from my life for so long. Do you know how long it is since I walked in the woods? My woods? Months, so much have been the demands of life.

And now I sit at home and feel guilty for turning down your invite! Woe is me! I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Ahhhh! I so much don’t want to disappoint you and fear I do.

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Henry David Thoreau

Can you understand the desire to be at home with the world shut out? The demands left outside the locked door? Have you ever felt the need to just hide away for a while and do the simple things. Maybe doing so is indulgent and even selfish but, if it is, I have taken a preference to selfishly indulge for a while. Forgive me.

I will be there when we have agreed to meet again for I honour responsibility and having made a commitment feel responsible to keep it. I am such a mix of emotions and needs that sometimes the contradictions within rise as torment and I fear I set myself up to be misunderstood. But in solitude there is a measure of protection. I am vulnerable only to myself and my own introspection.

Loneliness is the safest place I know.

Edgar Allen Poe

I hope you enjoyed your dinner with the company you had. Me, I wrestled with the guilt, watched the day fade to night and found a measure of peace.

Yours, sitting in the dark,

Wic