I’ve been feeling alone. Not lonely, just alone. I thought a new cell phone might connect me. A fancy ones with bells and whistles and sleek curves and soft touchable screens. I got bought her last week. She is my everything. My alarm clock. My calendar. My camera. My memory. My best friend. I even go so far as sleeping with her at night, tuck her underneath my pillow. She is just too little to spoon. I tried. Oh phone, what ever did I do without you?

And she’s the smartest best friend. She can help me navigate through traffic in New York City or find the nearest dive bar. She can even name the country song playing on the radio. We play games together, and she always knows the temperature outside whatever city we are in. She listens to me and sometimes she calls me. But what I love most about her, is the advice she gives. She has this way, this gift of answering life’s questions. My friend Jessica tells me it’s called an app and you simply download it to your phone. But she is wrong. I think she’s jealous of my new best friend…

This so called application software running on my phone, is more than an app. Seriously. Did you ever have a magic eight ball when you were younger? You know that plastic toy you shook and a floating dice on the bottom would have all the answers to life’s questions? Anyway, my plastic toy now resembles a phone/best friend answering my longing questions with affirmative, negative, or non-committal statements. So I ask my best friend questions like:

Should I cut my hair short and color it red?

Signs point to no

But recently I started asking my best friend more serious questions, serious enough to take note anyway…

Am I ever going to be in love again?

Yes, definitely

Will my heart feel they way it once did?

Concentrate and ask again later.

I don’t know why I am looking for answers. Asking a best friend. Yearning so. Clutching pictures of past lovers to my side. Sitting in the space between the crossroads of that which I know and that which I do not. Sitting in the space between a right turn to experience and a left turn to longing, confusion, the unknown. I stand at the crossroads now, right now, looking for God or a photon, or a boyfriend, or a scarecrow to point out my path and guide me home.

Should I stay on the Vineyard another winter?

My reply is no.

I once thought love, yeah love, my own little discrete bundle of light energy, zero mass and rest energy, love was neither slot  A or B. It wasn’t a right or left turn or both but a continuum. It’s not that I believe in everlasting love, I know better than that now. But I have to agree with Tolstoy in that, everything I understand, I understand only because I love.

Did he want to leave me behind?

Don’t count on it.

Most physicist and fortune tellers believe that information is not lost in the black holes but stored, protected in the ether. As this would make the world safe and predictable. Some call it Heaven. Stephen Hawking believes spacetime ties itself in knots and that information gets lost in the folds. And I can’t help but wonder if by spacetime he meant love, heartache lost in the folds. Love now wanting to be not lost but loved again.

Do you think astronauts or physicists or priests get lonely in search of pure love?

As I see it, yes

I feel as if I am at the central part of the hole; lost in fold as I just finished my first novel. A book of measurements and perceptions true only in relation to the given observer at a given place and time, me. A memoir about losing my love to cancer…

Did he mean to die?

Yes.

I feel lonely, maybe it’s emptiness. Is there a difference?

Signs point to no.

This grief rips and tears, heals and bandaids a skinned heart standing at the crossroads right or left. Right. Or. Left. And yet in all my questioning there is happiness, completion, connection. I think I might go to New York for a few months – the most extreme conditions, enormous energy, temperature and density or maybe I’ll drive to Minnesota. Briefly recount the losses and gains blurred, as my mom cooks a hotdish for me. “If I knew what I was doing with my life, I would be doing it.” I’d tell her when she asks…

Wait, I forgot what you said, should I stay on the Vineyard another winter?

I should probably go call my mom now. Decisions were much easier when I wasn’t alone.

Tags: anger, belongings, funerals, money, Depression, guilt, signs and connections