I haven’t written in a long time. I also haven’t washed my hair in days. I’ve been seeing how close I can get to the line of repulsion, of total isolation. It’s the same thing I do when I drink too much: leave the bar, walk dark streets alone, disappear from the party. I’ve been talking with my therapist about it, how I test the world to prove to myself it’s as hostile as I believe it is. I’m seeing my nights now as a series of scary experiments, like how far I can walk out of my neighborhood without getting assaulted. Fear stops me eventually. Or I just give up on being noticed, and I go home.
Last night my roommate (and friend, as she was quick to correct me) and I called a cab home to the East Village from that night’s house party in Bushwick. We didn’t talk as we crossed the river, instead watching our respective sides of the bridge pass by. I think about this scene in other contexts: lover’s spats, tension-filled car rides with parents, all the ways we allow silence in as a wall to separate. Yesterday, the silence felt like a hug. Felt like acceptance, like belonging. I’m trying to break down this idea in my head of “belonging” to a person, but last night I felt like her friend. And it made me feel so loved. I wrote an almost-haiku:
I’m reading Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. I started it at least two years ago, in a bookstore on Prince Street before I lived in New York. I told friends not to read it just then if they “were in a weird mental place” because of how reminded I felt of my loneliness when reading it, like being lonely was something I had to ignore or hide. Halfway through, I’m understanding loneliness more fully — seeing loneliness as mine, as fact, as where I am right now. I’ll admit I’m scared that telling you I’m lonely will make you see me differently, like an object to be pitied or put aside. I am writing this anyway, so that in any case you will see me as I am.
It’s fucking freezing outside. My warm body feels so very far away from everything out there. And then I remember the warmth on either side of my bedroom wall, my two friends that I share space with. Even now as I hole up in the dark writing this, one of them sends me a link to art she thinks I’d like. Today my cousin texted me from California with no idea of how I’ve been feeling, just to tell me she’d been thinking of me, that she wished I could be there, that she loved me. I’m ashamed to feel so alone when there are people that love me, but I’m realizing that loneliness and love can coexist together. I guess this is all to say that I am very lonely, and I am very loved, and I am grateful to experience both of those things as fully as I am.
I’ve been seeing my loneliness as an entity I live with, like a roommate. I take my loneliness on dates. We listen to sad music together. We sit together at dinner. I look it in the eyes. We don’t fight.
I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful to feel. I lived a year of numbness on a massive dose of Zoloft, and I remember feeling like a skeleton was pulling all the strings inside of me like a marionette, walking around in my skin. I don’t miss it. I like how close I feel to my loneliness now. It’s like you like being sad, my ex used to say, uncomfortable with my depression. It’s not that I like it, I would reply, it’s that it’s part of me. This is how my brain works. And I like my brain because of all the things it does for me, including this. All of it together is the human experience, isn’t it? All I have left to say is that I like mine.