I talk, therefore I am

I'm an independent person but this has been the longest period of time I've lived alone.  I was in a longterm relationship and before that, roommates and a couple of short lived romances.  Living alone doesn't mean loneliness- I felt that more acutely in my relationships but there is the factor of BEARING WITNESS (as I call it). 
You need someone to bear witness to your life or you might disappear from existance.  I can immediately tell when a friend calls and recounts all the minutiae of the day to me that she has no one to tell.  At work, a fellow teacher interrupted my class to tell me the long details of how her car mirror was clipped in a parking lot. 
My witness is the endless notebooks I fill with precisely this kind of information- incidents at the laundromat, how I felt slighted by a waitress, lists of what I need to do but may never get around to.  It's written down, it really happened, and thus I exist.
     I had the strange experience (on Facebook, of course) of a friend who died but her picture kept popping up even though I had (cruelly, perhaps?) unfriended her.  It was her birthday and wonderful memories were posted on her wall.  Facebook has a function its founders would never have imagined.

Suzanne

Secrets of green grass, backyards

and painted faces.

this California child remembered.

Then, Mediterranean blue,

Barcelona, a new love, captured.

In the streets of the Gothic,

on terraces high,

winding up caracol stairways,

You are present-

in the cool drink of cava,

the waves rolling in

from Badalona beach,

or the rocky view from Montsant.

Too short, this life

but  aprovechada.