One gallon of mung bean soup.
3 bowls of salty indica powder budding.
20 mandarin in four days.
My single friends doubted my "coupled" friends for not being able to comprehend the toughness and intolerable loneliness in life. But later they realize, being alone does not necessarily mean loneliness tag along and being "coupled" with a companion or an other, be it a significant one or not, does not mean one can get out of the solitude once and for all.
When watching that soap, you found it hard to believe that the single working girl who lives alone would talk to herself and think out loud in many occasions. I didn't say anything, but I understand why you wouldn't find it convincing. You have been loved, cared and surrounded with people and attention all your life, all the while I had been neglected and commonplace, as homely as I have been. Even so, I became a little bit of nostalgic over my single days.
I was a soliloquist myself. The first thing I did when I walked into the apartment was to switch on the light and the television. I slept with my tv on all night. I made decision by deploying all my plans out and I was always thinking aloud as if I had an invisible unborn twin sister to chitchat with. In terms of speech and languages, for the fear of being laughed at, I spent four years to work on my accent. In order to familiarize myself with the language A I was teaching and the language B I was learning, I code-switched from time to time. The result was dissatisfying though, because I was all mixed up with all three languages, including my native tongue. This was merely the linguistics, regarding language learning.
Then I quit the habit when I stepped into the relationship with you. It was not easy. Whenever I started to think out loud, you thought I was talking to you. I did it so consequently that I began to believe that I was actually addressing to you on every matter I was trying to reason with myself.
It was not until years later that I realized I've lost it all along, along the way you came. I grew to be accustomed to having you around all the time and having you pay me attention regardless of the topics. A lot of the times, you failed to make out the puns; a few times, you were totally lost when I cited the classics and began to speak rhetorically with the pedantic account. I was then aware of the fact that I might actually live in my own world. It is a world in which you somehow became an accidental tourist but decided to stay for good despite the huge discrepancy in our languages and circles of lives.
I lost my habitat, as well as my old quirky routine of soliloquy, along the way of moving. Moving into your world, and moving out of my own space.
Sinking in the loveseat, watching TV or websurfing/blogging or reading, I find myself immersed in words, expressions, slangs, verbally or aurally. Nonetheless, I have become dyslexic. I felt like a patient of dementia, constantly fail to express myself truthfully. During conversation, I always need a moment to find the perfect and exact word for the description. The demand for precision thence pushes me to a point that I cannot stand my own speech or any illogical trains of thoughts that are reflected in my speech and in others'.
You find me sitting quietly, with my usual frown. You ask why. And I can't reply, for I don't find the answer myself.
There are times when I am completely left alone, like these days, it was like I have retrieved my single days: tv news anchorpersons's sonorous comments and looping old and updated reports at all times, buzzing music of all kinds, soaps or sitcom reruns with supper, movies as dessert; all the while, all my stuffed animals accompanied me, you know my animal farm. I would deliberately turn off the phones, knowing that you'd be too busy to call. Never bother to call you or email you. (You'd find me alive when you really try to look into my status anyway.) I would stay in for the whole week until the mail box is full or the garbag becomes to stink. No makeup, no pretension, no greetings, not a word spoken, nor spoken to. No need to take medicine even if having pains all over; I will just sleep in, lie there, until every inch of the muscle sore. Only then I see why the paralysed and the unconscious ones need someone to flip them over.
Even if being sulky, I bite my lips and cry a little quietly, until the image of the senile cat lady emerges. That's how I see myself were I to lose you in late years. No need to have an offspring to share the pain, to carry on the alienation. That solitude is anyhow lasting for a hundred years, Márquez has prophetted it. I'd lose all my words or transferred them to all the inaudible ones. No one would ferret out what I have been thinking and how I have been living my life till my death. Nothing to fear of, just loneliness and silence, which we all should get used to; nothing is dreadful, only solitude, which we all should be prepared for.