An Unencumbered Man

In the years I had seen him in and around the rooms, he seemed to me an unencumbered man, a man who had gone through life alone. At a meeting one evening, he acknowledged his solitary path when he shared that some pressing reason would compel him to rush home at the end of a meeting rather than hang out with group members afterward. He would get home only to realize that there had been no pressing reason to rush off. The result was that, night after night, year after year, he would eat alone. I had heard this sort of thing before, AA men and women acknowledging their difficulty in easing free of their isolation. But, on this evening, for whatever reason, I heard it. The man was talking to me. The man was me.