The company of one

Monday, 5 Jan 09

Nikon D80; Focal length: 200mm; Aperture value: F/5.6; Exposure time: 1/100 sec.; ISO speed: 100

It’s a strange dynamic between friendship and relationships.  And if you’re like me, and believe that the strongest relationships have their foundation in the closest of friendships, when that person’s gone away for a few weeks, you realize nothing quite beats being lonely.

It’s not even that you don’t have other friends to spend all that time with.  You do, but they don’t know you well enough to know the back story behind things you find fascinating.

Take last night’s dream for example:  I’m walking along a paved path lined with tall, leafy trees on both sides.  At the end, there’s a gated entrance.  Beyond this, the path breaks into a partially forested hillside on a well worn, beaten dirt path.  A branch juts out on my left upon which is perched a chicken on it’s own bird nest.  Further up, forested hillside breaks open into a lush green hilltop carpeted with dandelions.  A clear blue sky is all that’s on the horizon.  There, I have a conversation about point and shoot cameras and tripods.

A pretty standard dream, right?  But what about the significance of each aspect? –

• Path lined with trees — my 2nd semester urban design project centered on an avenue.
• The chicken — having spent 4 years of high school studying agriculture, I don’t think chickens make their nests above ground, in trees.  Right?  More significantly, it points to my fear of animals, and the fact that I dropped a chicken in Year 8.
• Green grass — in an episode of Scrubs, J.D. finally takes some time out for himself and lies in a huge park just thinking about life.
• Point and shoot camera — my dissatisfaction with my Olympus mju700
• Tripod — recalling the countless conversations I’ve had with my best friend about getting a tripod for my DSLR, but never actually getting around to it.

Explaining the dream loses the familiarity that helps make it amusing and fascinating.

And perhaps this explains the irregularity of my blog posts these past few years.  When you have someone familiar to share your life with, blogging to semi-strangers becomes less stimulating.

How do you find being lonely?

Posted at 11:48 am in Dreams, Snapshots | Respond?

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