does it make a sound?

Alone in Wyoming, 2006. 

I think my ankles have shrunk. The straps on my sandals that have seen their last summer are looser. I wiggled the fastener through a new hole this morning. I have muscles in my back I have never before seen. My body is changing, maybe, but there is no one here to confirm it. If a tree falls in the forest...

Love in the Time of Cholera should not be read alone. 622 love affairs, slowly unwound. The book reads like a vacation - its lushness, the exotic prose. A vacation best enjoyed two-by-two. 

Still, there are lessons. 

"After having known so many of them during his incursions as a solitary hunter, Florentino Ariza had come to realize that the world was full of happy widows. He had seen them go mad with grief at the sight of their husband's corpse, pleading to be buried alive in the same coffin so they would not have to face the future without him, but as soon as they grew reconciled to the reality of their new condition he had seen them rise up from the ashes with renewed vitality...They wasted their overabundant hours doing what they had not had time for before, sewing the buttons on the dead man's clothes...But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate...They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return... 

In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honourable way to live was at the body's bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone."

Today I'm wearing the feather and turquoise earrings I bought on the side of the road as I was driving alone through Arizona. They turn my ears green, but it's a good reminder today - I've moved through the world, fully independent, since my first day on this earth. We choose to move closer to each other, we choose to create more space, but we are always, always alone in our bodies.