Happy Solitude

I wake up most mornings with the sun slicing through the blinds like a dull knife, carving up the room into strips of light and shadow. It's quiet, the kind of quiet that doesn't scream but settles in your bones like old debt. I'm a solitary bastard, content in it, the way a stray dog learns to love the chain-link fence that keeps the world at bay. My folks? They cashed out early, both gone before the calendar flipped me past fifty. Their funerals were cheap affairs—rain on the graves, a handful of mourners who smelled like regret and bad cologne. But something shifted in me then, like a lock picking itself open. The ache hollowed me out, sure, but it filled me back up with a cold, clear fire. No more chasing ghosts.Back in the haze of my younger days, I was a fool for the wild ones, those women with eyes like broken bottles and laughs that cut deeper than they healed. I'd hand over my wallet, my time, my goddamn soul on a platter, and they'd pick at it like vultures on roadkill. "Baby, you're my everything," they'd purr, right before vanishing into the arms of some slicker shadow. And the friends? Christ, what a parade of leeches. They'd slap my back at the bar, borrow twenties they'd never repay, crash on my couch with stories of their grand schemes that always ended with me footing the bill. I was starving for a tribe, you see—lonely as a thumb in a boxing glove, desperate to belong. But one dawn, nursing a black coffee and a bruised ego, it hit me: a pack of losers ain't a team; it's just a mob shuffling toward the same ditch. Their dreams reeked of stale piss and broken promises, maggoty with failure. Why swallow that shit when I could spit it out and walk away?Nah, I've sworn off the bottle and the smoke. No blurred edges for me, no coughing up my lungs for a fleeting buzz. I clawed my way to this scrap of green by wading through the muck—nights in sweat-soaked factories, days humping crates till my back screamed mutiny, hawking poems to drunks in dive bars who tipped in lint and lies. Every dollar's scarred, earned in the furnace of what doesn't kill you. And I'll be damned if I scatter it like confetti for strangers or sweet-talkers. It's mine, locked tight in the drawer beside my bed, a quiet fortress against the wolves.These days, I rattle around in my own skull, building walls from books and silence. The apartment's a shrine to the ordinary: chipped mugs, a radio spitting jazz from another era, windows fogged with the breath of solitude. Alone? Sure. But lonely? That's for the suckers still hawking their hearts at the market. This is my kingdom, vast as a hangover and twice as honest. The door's cracked if you want a piece—sit quiet, share a straight story, pass the salt without the circus. But play the fool, juggle your chaos like it's a virtue, and hit the bricks. Clown world's got room for all the painted freaks and howling hyenas. Me? I'm done feeding the circus. The ring's empty now, and the spotlight's finally off.