Rebecca D. Martin

I’d like to think we all go to the coffee shop alone sometimes. I’ve done movies by myself, including every Wednesday of Spring 2002 after that baffling three-hour Victorian Poetry graduate seminar. Memento and Count of Monte Cristo from the center of the back row, returning to myself. Some people I know say they could never dine alone. Every Saturday morning for a year, I ate breakfast at Sunny Point Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina, only stopping after another patron took an interest. I have lived alone. Daytime, I wandered the silent apartment barefoot, sunlight on pine floors. When I got a roommate mid-lease, I thought I would choke. Even when she wasn’t there, she was: lights on, the iron where I didn’t put it. My teapot from England in pieces on the floor. 

Many autistics say they don’t like to be perceived. That’s true, but this isn’t that. This is sensory deprivation under a warm bath. Bus rides alone. Those heady flowers in Northwest Wales that I could smell but never identify. Call them wilderness; call them truce. The little girl inside me who got lost behind the trauma four decades ago. Liking her comes easiest when alone. I can’t explain why. Or I can, but I don’t want to. When asked, “But what about your children?” I roll my eyes. Obviously, I want them to learn to like themselves, too. Touch their boundaries and limn the place where they meet the world. 

Rebecca D. Martin is a Virginia-based writer, museum docent, and educator whose work has appeared in Isele, Susurrus, Dappled Things, and Asterales, among others. She can be found at rebeccadmartin.substack.com, where she talks about books, nature, poetry, and being neurodivergent.