Pushed away: Dates (Fruit) (II)

It lives apart and keeps both company and plenty at a distance, on the settled understanding that happiness and love are for other people and that its own presence in any room is likely to be an error waiting to be identified. A mother who rejected steadily and made whatever the child did into the wrong thing produced a person for whom solitude is not preference but relief, since a room with nobody in it contains nothing to be wrong in front of. What it asks for is one ordinary evening spent in company, with a mistake made in it and nothing following.

Left alone I can't get anything wrong, and that turns out to be worth a lot to me.

It echoes the Wanderer of the old English poem, alone on the cold sea with the hall gone, keeping his sorrow locked in his chest because that was what was expected of a man in his position. The form implies a task: to say it aloud on the ship, to whoever is on it.