After the Quiet

There is a question I keep turning over, quietly, the way you keep a stone in your pocket without meaning to.

After too long alone, does a person still remember how to fall in love?

I do not have a clean answer. Solitude is comfortable in the way an unused muscle is comfortable. Nothing hurts until you try to move again. You get good at your own company. You learn to like the silence, or you learn to survive it, and after a while the two feel almost the same.

Maybe the skill is not lost, only sleeping. Maybe you do not forget, you just stop practicing, and one day someone makes you want to remember. I would like to believe that. Most days I almost do.

That is all for this one. Back to the technical notes tomorrow.