January 08, 2003 | 9:13 PM

It is so quiet here. So quiet.

Spent the evening scrubbing floors, throwing out scraps of paper tucked in the corners of my apartment-- scraps with rubbed out pencil markings like ancient hieroglyphics I can't decipher. Who was this person that wrote in this loopy hand? I hate how I contsantly discard myself like last year's fashion. I can't keep up with my own beliefs.

Remember the Little Prince standing on his own planet-- I feel like that now. It's a strange feeling to be so disconected yet looking out on the whole wide world and seeing the ecosystem of thought and emotion between people. It sucks that in order to do this (at least for me) requires such a level of disconnect. To see all sides means not relating at all-- not feeling, just existing like a camera, recording what's around me.

I have become the only member of an audience, having formerly been an integral character who stepped off the stage to just watch in cold fascination.

I hear people talk and their words reverberate ten seconds later.

I was holding onto a rope attached to... what? Something-- I don't really know. And I let it go and I've been shot out of the solar system since-- not the same person. It was only moments ago but I'm light years away now.

Maybe I've been living on Solaris and didn't know it-- didn't know the people I was relating to were only the people I'd made up from some composite picture of different dreams and memories and roles I forced them to play in my own head games. Can people actually really relate to each other as opposed to each person relating to his/her perception of the other person? I always felt I had an innate ability to relate on what some might eye rollingly call "a soul level." Something beyond thought. I've had that with several people. And now poof it's gone (Ok not poof-- a poof that took years to unfold like a mushroom cloud in superslowmotion)-- Perhaps the relating is now an entity to itself rather than being the tethering line between myself and someone else. An entity to itself, relating only to itself, it's own complete circle, on its own planet, surveying the charades and mannerisms of the little world below.

And this may be the biggest reason why I took to drinknig alone. And the biggest reason why I've given that up.