Wine at Inappropriate Hours

A Love Letter to Loneliness

It's 10AM on a Wednesday, and I'm drinking Côtes du Rhône from a coffee mug because all my wine glasses are dirty and honesty starts with small admissions. From my desk, I watch the tourists photographing Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden, looking for beauty in arranged stones and careful water.

The phone rings. My former department chair, again. I let it go to voicemail, where she'll leave another message about "opportunities" and "reconsiderations" in perfectly modulated academic French. I pour another mug of wine.

You'd understand this, whoever you are, reading this from your own inappropriate hour. How sometimes love is just the absence of judgment, how romance can be the space between what we should do and what we actually do.

I write: "Loneliness is not the absence of others but the presence of ourselves, undiluted." Then I delete it. Too precious. I write: "Je bois donc je suis." I drink therefore I am. Delete.

Outside, a couple argues in Mandarin. Their voices carry across the garden, punctuating the morning with passion I can't understand but recognize. Love sounds the same in every language when it's ending.

The wine is warm now, the morning getting on with itself despite my resistance. I close my laptop, watch the garden's carefully controlled wilderness, and think about you (all of you) drinking your own wine at your own inappropriate hours, writing your own love letters to loneliness.

We're alone together in this, at least.