The Apotheosis of Solitude

PART I: Out of Darkness

Even amidst the dust of annihilation remains a nascent residuum of hope. It is this simple, incontrovertible fact; this single iridescent pixel in an otherwise monochrome nightscape: which lies at the heart of all our problems. All my problems. If I didn’t have hope whispering like an ever-present dæmon into my ear, I might not have done all of the things I did. If I didn’t have hope of a better outcome I might not have pursued beyond the bounds of reason and sanity all that I pursued. If we didn’t have hope, then maybe; just maybe: we might be able to sleep a little more soundly.

But what a world we would wake up to. A world without hope truly would be a monochrome nightscape; a nightscape devoid of much more than mere colour or light. It would be a world devoid of effort, art and industriousness. We would sleep soundly; but we would do little else.

Everything that I shall recount was built upon and sustained by hope. Not insanity, vindictiveness or malice. But hope.

It was a singular night that brought me to my first encounter with Solitude.
Solitude was the name written in her nature; a name soon to be written in my solitary heart. That night, like many others, I had wandered through the city in thoughtful, poem-filled loneliness. That night I saw, for the first time, the young woman who would raise my art, my juvenilia if you will, to the extremes of reverence. That night, compelled by a desire beyond all that I had known, beyond all that I could endure, I entered into the worship of the terrifying realms of art and beauty in a way that I had only ever read of, only ever dreamed of; in a way that I had previously dismissed as fantasy and cloying artifice until that night and many subsequent ones.

On my way to eat my usual meal in my usual bistro, I happened to pass the door of a bar-cum-nightclub frequented by students, outsiders and struggling artist types. I had passed this door around this time without thought or remark on more nights than I can count. But that night, as I passed the door, that slender, solitary figure approached from the other direction. She carried a sticker-clattered guitar case on her elegant shoulder and walked with studied, swaying procession. Her hair, the unlikely tint of carnival candyfloss, cascaded in a nimbus that framed her delicate countenance.

As her hand stretched to the door handle, she looked directly at me; our eyes locked in a moment of perfect concordance and the single, devastating phoneme…“Hey!”…escaped her lips. In the next moment, the door had opened and shut, the beer-smelt air sucking her in.

I stopped. I breathed. Deeper, harder than usual. My heart hammered insistently on the inner side of my sternum. The ever-constant sounds of the distant streets, of the city always in motion never at rest, fizzled and melted in the growing hammering of my heart and the growing thickness of the air. I was alone. In the darkness of the street, I was alone. But for an instant, I did not feel lonely. On this remarkable street; on this singular night: there was another.

Another.

The pounding insistence of the blood in my veins threw out my hand, pulled the door towards me and then I too was enveloped by the intoxicated air.

She stood at the long, wooden bar; downed a small glass of yellow liquid: shrugged off her jacket of crimson velvet and, discarding the jacket in the open guitar case at the foot of a nearby stool, turned and strode to the far corner. Her guitar was already propped against a stool on the makeshift stage at the other end of the room. Solitude now mounted this dais, gathered her instrument in one fluid movement, and spun to face the crowd.

“Hey!”

For an hour I stood drinking in every moment of her compelling performance. Her voice was cool and clear as a winter sun. Her playing was gentle yet strident and spoke to each individual in subtly intimated tones.

I drank her in; every note of the strings, every cadence of the voice, every gesture of the hand, every flick of the candyfloss hair: from my shadowed seat in the darkest, farthest corner of the room.

I may have been shrouded in darkness, but I was staring directly into the sun. It bathed me in all its searing effulgence and enervated the very core of my being.

Before the splendid hour of her singing had ended; a sonnet had formed in my reeling mind. My first sonnet. A poem of yearning from one heart to another. My mind could not contain such a poem for long before memory would betray it to decay, so I hastily transcribed it from the book of memory to the more trusty notebook I always carried in my pocket.

As Solitude’s set came to an end, I ripped the page from the notebook and in a moment of need; need of what I don’t know: I quickly crossed the room to where her jacket lay across her open guitar case and surreptitiously dropped the note into her pocket.

I rushed from the bar; not wanting to be discovered: back into the cool night, trembling with excitement and fear.

Sonnet I: E Tenebrae.

End of Part I.