That Empty Inbox Feeling

"The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience."
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 103.





April 2009

Jeff is gone to Florida for an airshow. Left early this AM. He never used to correspond much when away and that always bothered me. But now I don't have that empty inbox feeling. We keep in touch by five word text messages (probably only one a day) and that will be enough.

I remember when I first rented an office on Ballard Avenue in Seattle for my publishing company. The upper floor of a pioneer cabin that had been moved from the Central District. Two identical cabins that had been moved together, relocated to Ballard's historic district, and conjoined. It was an attic, really, with a window on each end; one looked out on the adjacent sloping shingled roof, where rain fell often; the other, down the side street at old buildings and toward the ship canal.

During the first few days I worked there I had no phone & no internet. I had been working out of the house before that, where I had all these things, and a husband, a cat, a garden, and neighbors with whom I was acquainted. Now it was going to be me in a solitary room with its steep narrow stairs. A hermitage, almost.

Part way through the first morning it became overwhelmingly evident there was no loneliness. No one could contact me, I couldn't read my email, so there was never a sense of disappointment, of being forgotten. An email would only take off part of the edge, but the edge would return: that edge of wanting contact with people, of wanting to be known and remembered. Natural human needs partly and often poorly satisfied by technology and therefore never really satisfied.

That experience is part of what drives me this year. Lonely? Go outside. Call someone or go to a café. The depth of satisfaction in seeing a friend in person—or anyone, really—assuages the loneliness so much more completely.