Sometimes it's just so wonderful, and sometimes it's not.
It's like that time I walked into the German bakery in Fredericksburg and I was so excited to be in a place that sold so many delicious pastries and cookies and cakes because (let's face it) I have a sweet tooth the size of an elephant's molar. I'd been inside before, eaten the apple turnovers and snickerdoodles and bearclaws (my dad likes those, as I recall), and looked at the decorations that told all the tourists how proud the owners were to be of a German bloodline. And I walked in and I looked around and I took a breath and I gagged and I walked back outside. The air inside was sweet. It was sweet sweet sweet, so sweet, too sweet for me to breathe in. My sweet tooth might've been able to handle it, but there is more to me than just my sweet tooth, and those other parts of me couldn't do it, couldn't take the weight of the sweetness.
Sometimes I find myself back in that bakery. But the thing is, when the bakery isn't really a bakery, there isn't any exit, and I have to find my own way out, MacGyver-style.
Humans need community, I know this. But sometimes, just every so often, isn't it easier to be the hermit? It is a very selfish thing to say that dealing with other people, other people's issues, other people's emotions, is really just a big hassle. Some of my favorite times have been when I am driving home to Colorado or driving back to Texas, when I have 11 hours of solid thinking time, all to myself, no one to interrupt, no one to bother me, no one else to think about.
And that is selfish.
Solitary drives aren't all bad, of course (sometimes they're all that keep me sane), but I might have a tendency to cling to the hermit-like aspects of them. "Because we're all just temporary nomads, traveling side by side until there is a choice. Then you will take one, and I will take the other, and we will be 'us' no longer but 'you' and 'me'."
Thank God my hermit tendencies do not rule for long. Thank God (quite literally, not me) that I do not regard others as merely a hassle for the majority of my thoughts. Thank God, in short, that I am only an asshole part of the time and not all of the time. You'll have to forgive me (or not, really) for the times when I am.
The music starts again.
