As a child he was usually alone. His mother was a credit union manager and his father travelled a lot. He had a sister who was almost ten years older, so she was in a completely different world. He often marvelled at the mystery of her world as she seemed to be seldom around. When he was much younger, she was his baby-sitter, but now at around six years old, no one thought anything about his being left alone for a little while.
Yet, there were many moments of loneliness so intense that he found it unbearable. He would look into the night, straining at sounds and passing cars that might offer some rescue, but all passed by with dissonant indifference. Tears cut through his separateness, descending rivulets of absence, desolate and desperate. He stood in the silence and wished for something that was beyond his grasp, outside of his understanding, a vast distance shone like a remote continent, now lost and obscured by the haze and debris of Time.
Yet, there was a presence that made him distinctive. Everyone who met him later in life sensed a special source that nourished him like an inner fountain of awareness and resourcefulness. His aloneness was not a barrier, not a wall creating an unbreachable partition, but more like a vast gulf that invited many obscure and ingenious routes to his inner world. This gulf provided a means of mediation with his apparent detachment.
Some might say that his aloneness became his strength, if you can find strength in isolation. It was a strength for a different time, aloof, but waiting for ultimate strangers who would invade his defenses and harvest the richness of wonder and beauty that might emerge in mutual paths of discovery. It was a timeless isolation that could yield instantly to someone who possessed the linchpin to his secret world. There was his immediate world that everyone knew, but there was an alternate quietness waiting within that promised more than one could imagine. Such a sensibility needed the originality of outsiders, alien visitors who could read the invisible terrain.
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