"Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening."

"it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness."

"Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior."

by Pema Chodron from "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advise for Difficult Times"

Before you, I never knew an "us."
I came and left as I pleased because I could.
Understanding it didn't hurt me to do so. At all.
Maybe the people I met felt a different connection.
Maybe the weather was brighter for them and the colors more vivid.

Then, in the middle of the sweltering summer heat, you were there.
Wearing a Casio watch that also functioned as a calculator with a half-smoked cigarette in your fingers, nails painted black.
You were so, you. Raw. Unfabricated.

And I loved it.
I loved you.

How we chain-smoked cigarettes and how you wrapped your arms around my waist while I heard the most euphoric laugh ever.

I wish I realized how similar we were. That for us, this was a first.
To wake up so early to meet someone and feel as if each step gets lighter as we near. To whisper in the dark while being unable to close the proximity between us, but feeling the tension of needing to.

You were not another piece on the chessboard.
For me you were real.
And I can't bring myself to provoke a conversation, but I’m thankful.
And wish I could’ve gotten to know “us” longer.

She was perusing the linoleum trails when I walked into conoco gas at 6:49. I bought $20 of unleaded at pump three.
"I miss my jeep, but I sure don't miss the gas mileage"
she giggled from behind me with a filmy grocery bag bracleting her wrist. He name was Kiyomi, a Japanese citrus. "When my mom was pregnant with me, that's all she would eat. She joked that she'd give birth to a fruit instead of a baby."
She told me she plucked her shirt from the hamper when I complimented her outfit, and about her "**** neighbors" with whom she shared a complex. I made an excuse for the dirt sponging my shirt and tattooing down my legs. "It's from landscaping", I said as a way to somehow justify it. I felt like I'd known Kiyomi a long time when we said goodbye.  
With a half tank of gas, I started up Genevieve and we rolled off our opposite ways. It was as I walked up and down King Sooper's ribs of commercial aisles that I was so grateful to Kiyomi, the fruit girl. She showed her humanness to me. We hung up our social normalities like jackets, and spoke in the unfabricated way children do. Friday, June 3rd, roughly 6:53 pm, a girl of soil and a girl of fruit collided in connection. Like it was natures very own conversation.