Letter To Solitude

Dear Solitude, 
​
There you are, my dear old friend.
I've missed you.
Lately, I have found myself overwhelmed with a magnitude of crowds, of people, of company. And I longed for some alone time with you. 
We've been dancing this dance... you and I... for many years:
Since I learned how to walk. Since I learned how to talk. Since I learned how to play with no one else but you. You showed me how to put puzzles together, and how to read books every night, and how to write in my diary, and how to write poems about the boys I loved, and how to cry myself to sleep at nights when things were tough for a sensitive kid like me, and how to imagine worlds with you guiding me through it.
When I was ten you and I got to have our own bedroom. And not so long after you became my travel buddy, my comrade, my second in command.
Or were you my leader?
Guiding me with courage, despite others who mistakenly called you 'loneliness.' 
You'd always laugh at that common error: '
Loneliness! How silly to think of ME as loneliness!  Ha!'
I laughed right along with you, urging people to call you by your name.
I've been your defender. I've been your follower. I've been your alley in a world that doesn't always accept you as who you are. A world who is afraid of you, and mistake you for another. A world that thinks of you as a prisoning thought, rather than a freeing one. 
But to me you are a source of freedom; Freedom of the self to be, and grow and explore...
so that self can go outside to the world and know WHO it is, and WHAT it is, and WHY it is. 

Love, 

​Me.