Wherever you go you take you with you. Not a new discovery. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it better (among others). Here's another one: Would you be happy married to you? It's about living with yourself. i have been alone so long, widowed 40 years now, that I need solitude. The onslaught of thought is so daily (that dreaded word), that I need a lot of time to cope with it. So, here I am, as I reported, pausing to cat-sit and write in a strange city, house, environment, and alone again, I mean really alone. Those are the words of a song: "alone again, naturally". I can hum it, too. Don't get maudlin. When I was doing my research for my books about bereavement I found a statistic that is still valid. For every hundred women starting out on "life's path", 75 of them will end up alone. It depends where "end" ends. It goes on. The singleness will be for different reasons: single and never married; married and divorced or married and widowed (the numbers are reversed on this but the result is the same). By now, as one of the 75 and counting, I welcome it. Happy is not the operative word, though. Aim for content.