Blue Lonesome

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Ms. Lonesome.

That was the name he gave her, how he thought of her from the beginning. But it was more than just a name because she was more than just a woman alone. She was the saddest, loneliest person he’d ever encountered: pure blue, pure lonesome.

He knew loneliness; every night he slept with it and every day it rode him, burrowed deep, like a tick rides a deer. He’d seen it in a thousand faces other than his own, but never as naked as it was in hers. Part of its essence was pain, the soul-heavy kind that never eases, never goes away. And part of it was... sorrow and loss? disillusionment? emptiness? yearning? He couldn’t be sure because he could not get close enough to her to judge. She was like a woman encased in glass — you could see her more or less clearly but you couldn’t reach her.

Pure blue, pure lonesome. If this were the thirties and he had the talent of Jelly Roll Morton or Duke Ellington or one of the other jazz greats, he would write a ballad about her. And he would call it “Blue Lonesome.”

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