...apart from the world, of spending the rest of my existence in a space-faring sphere in which I would never again want or need anything worldly to subsist. It would have been simple -- and it would have been enough.
 

That summer played host to a state of mind that could only have existed in the person I was then. I frequently both engaged and tried to esape from it with soaring music in my ears on long evening walks that many times stretched into the wee hours. My parents, especially my father, never seemed to understand that need. He would often point out to me the dichotomy of my going out just as the rest of the world was going to sleep. I suppose he thought those post-sunset strolls was just me being willfully unusual and contrary. They were born of a simple unspoken hunger for peace, of mind and soul both. I can only assume most people never experience that -- or somehow find other means of satisfying their balancing needs.

But I was always a nocturnal person -- night-time is delight time -- and the music gave wings to my imagination and painted across my mind's eye the vista of finding myself alone on a pier (sometimes I recall the image as an empty beach) with nothing ahead of me but ocean. There I would stand, the only person in the world, sheltered by the calmness of my solitude and the atmosphere of twilight slowly burning black. I would see myself overcome by an aura, defeating the darkness around me and inside of me, shifting the sea into respectful tranquility. A living alien bubble would slowly descend upon me, selecting me to inhabit and navigate it without communication, only feeling, and making me a subject it could teach, one with a heart easy to reach.
 

Such a heart was mine, never worn on my sleeve so much as hovering above me like a balloon, always sharing with the world, willing or not, my every mood, emotion, and desire. And perhaps more vulnerable than most to pin-pricks. More than once, it had loved profoundly -- and borne the abyssal pain of the deep affection only experienced by the young and the foolish. The higher it had climbed, the deeper it had tumbled.
 

And the heart of seventeen that once inhabited this pearl-less shell had risen and fallen seemingly without end, too fragile to carry the pain, but always too strong not to brave the unsafe once more.
 

The many I wanted to embrace had kept me outside, never allowing me to be part of the quilt because the patch I offered them was not cut from their cloth. My thinking roamed to places they did not recognize, my feelings lived in valleys beyond their reach, and my perceptions never encompassed the untold boundaries they would never cross.
 

I was alien to them because I did not inevitably conform to unspoken rules of which I had little instinctive need or conception. It was never stubborn defiance. It was only that I did not know. Yet it gave them license to deny me their compassion and affection and to pour mockery over the pure self I tried to safeguard, just as I began to gain awareness of the world. It has never been easy to bask in it since.

 

So, with the certitude only a seventeen-year-old seems to have, I wanted no part of them anymore.

 

Whether anyone would miss me scraped the edge of my consciousness, but only for a moment. Even as the thought hit me, I could see that self-pity was not my answer, strangely appealing as it could be. There was never a question of going where there was no return. I only wanted so much to disappear, to have no more sorrow discolouring my life, even if it meant I would never again share my space with another human being.