I had stumbled into a remarkably compatible arrangement. Between me and this woman there were no moods, tensions, depressions, or withdrawals. We seemed never to bore, irritate, or intrude on each other. We conducted our daily lives independently, yet were always delighted to spend an evening at home together. Conversation was an ever-deepening pleasure between us, but neither of us ever made the other feel guilty for wanting to be alone. In short, the relationship was simplicity itself, and it provided us both with the joys of civilized friendship and domestic tranquility, a condition of life I had never known.

What took me by surprise was the relief I felt at not living alone. The relief and the gratitude. After all, what was happening here? I wasn't with a lover or even with an intimate friend. I was simply sharing a house with a compatible person. I had the pleasure of coffee in the morning and a chat in the evening with a woman I enjoyed talking with and the comfort of knowing we spent the night under the same roof. It was the absence of gross loneliness that was having an extraordinary effect on me.

And it was extraordinary. To begin with, I felt calm every day and all through the day--deeply calm. I realized from this calm that ordinarily I sustain, and probably have for years, a kind of low-grade anxiety that seeps daily into the nervous system. Nothing to get excited about, certainly nothing I can't handle, but it's a feeling I have, one that I had stopped registering and would not again have been aware of if it weren't for this superb calm that now came bubbling up in me a couple of times a day.

Along with the calm, I felt smoothed out inside, as though some great blue-and-white wave had cleaned me down, washing away the grit. It was then I realized I feel gritty inside, all the time. Again, nothing to get excited about, nothing that can't be handled. Just there it was. Loneliness feels gritty.

Then the fog in my head--always a shred of it floating here or there--seemed to clear out. I found myself concentrating for hours, instead of minutes, at a time. I hadn't realized until that moment how continually my attention is being shredded, the worried granulation of inner clarity that is my constant companion.

I looked around then, at my life, and I saw that I had not learned to live alone at all. What I had learned to do was strategize; to lie down until the pain passed, to evade, to get by. I wasn't drowning, but I wasn't swimming either. I was floating on my back, far from shore, waiting to be saved.

Looking closely at a condition that hadn't been reviewed in years, I saw that once again the thing was being named; the thing I knew and had forgotten times without number; the thing that each time I name I make more my own, but each time I forget makes me lose ground. I found myself remembering the time long ago when I had first understood the thing I would always forget. It was also the day I understood why I walk, why I am a walker in the city. The memory materialized so powerfully that suddenly the day was standing before me.