Desolation

It’s a Friday night in late June. I am in my apartment. A metallic sheen of silvery light ekes through the open living room window. I’m sitting on my couch, watching the light, listening to the sound of the city outside as it churns, and exhales. It’s an orchestral sound, vaguely ominous, composed of traffic, foghorns, and contrails of fading conversation. It reminds me of an ocean, breathing. I sit and I listen. Shadows crawl along the walls. The T.V. is off. A copy of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye lies closed on the floor. My open laptop glows ominously on the coffee table in front of me, like a portal into some kind of matrixical underworld. On the screen is an empty Medium doc. The cursor blinks maddeningly.

I am alone.

I’ve been moved into a new apartment for roughly 2 months. Aside from my roommates, I feel as if I am a stranger to everyone. Faces on the street and the subway have become familiar, and a handful of nightly pills have resulted in mornings of momentary reflection, but for the most part, I spend my free time sitting alone in my inadequately windowed apartment, attempting to read or write, failing in that effort, and trying instead to convince myself that my apartment does not feel like one of those drawers morticians slide dead people inside of — Dark, small, indistinguishable from the drawer next door.

I moved to the city to pursue a career in grip/electric work, an event which meant I would be able to call myself a gaffer or key grip — like, a real union lad— for the first time in my life. I was ecstatic. I found a new apartment with my two close friends that overlooked Houston Street and Lower East Side. I arranged the furniture exactly as I wanted the furniture to be arranged. I did not anticipate that 2 months after moving, I would still be lonely, but, to be honest, in the beginning, the prospect of being alone didn’t bother me. In fact, it excited me.

I am partially an introvert. I know this about myself. I enjoy being alone. I enjoy socializing, but moreover — as is true of most introverts, I think — I romanticize the idea of being alone. Upon moving to the city, I imagined that it would say something about myself, being OK with being alone, as if an appreciation for solitude acts as some kind of evidence that one is stoic, strong, and confident.

As is the case with most things one desires so solipsistically, however, once I obtained the solitude I sought, I found only disappointment, sadness, guilt, and anxiety. Which is to say that I found loneliness.

Being alone for any real length of time is romantic only in theory. In fact, all prolonged stretches of solitude — the kind that introverts like me impose upon themselves all the time, the kind that does not actually necessitate being physically alone — inevitably morph into loneliness.

For me, as the nights alone turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, what happened was this: First, the silence of my apartment curdled into a sort of constant static. Next, to keep that static from getting louder, I started telling myself that it wasn’t my fault, what was happening to me — it wasn’t my fault that I hadn’t reached out to or interacted with any of the nearly one million other people who live here in this city or who ride the same train as me or walk on the same sidewalk; it wasn’t my fault that my apartment felt like a morgue; it wasn’t my fault that I’d stopped texting people back and ventured to and from work via wordless Uber rides, and ordered all my dinners in. The problem was that I was isolated — both physically and in that ethereal way other people likely wouldn’t understand — and in that isolation, I was helpless. I haven’t slept in my bed in 3 weeks, it’s become a storage unit.

It didn’t work; I couldn’t evade my complicity. In time I recognized this, that I was lonely, and that my loneliness was entirely self-inflicted, but by the time I did I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt weighed down by some kind of heavier gravity. I felt like a satellite that’d fallen out of orbit — slowly drifting away into the darkness, further and further away from the place I used to be.

The screen of my laptop fades to grey and dies. The sound of a passing motorcycle rips the room in two. In the darkness it sounds like a monster, gnarling.

This is one of the chief ironies of loneliness: For “artists”, especially, the kind of solitude which lends itself to loneliness is necessary, yet at the same time, it’s totally and definitively noxious.

As James Baldwin once wrote: “One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern.”

Wherein lies the conundrum: How can you meaningfully articulate the experience of being alive if you yourself are only in tune with the broken clockwork of your own anxiety, the echo chamber of your own skull?

You can’t — any attempts at as much will be hollow, and disingenuous. And disingenuous is the worst thing anyone can be. Because without ingenuity, all you’re left with is cliche.

This irony is, of course, in my case, rendered all the more guilt-inducing by a second, sort of sub-irony that I’m now all too aware of: If one-third of the people living in the city I live in, also, would profess to experiencing feelings of loneliness, it can be assumed that every one of those 300,000 lonely people are ultimately just as lonely as me. Which means that I am the opposite of isolated. Which means I don’t have any kind of excuse at all. I am trying to make myself digestible. I am trying to make myself easy to love.

Even with all the loneliness, I was so desperate to be understood that I would grab people and shove them inside my heart, where they stuck out like splinters, and it would hurt every time I felt anything. So maybe that’s why. Agony and pain are too much, but I don’t seem to have a valid excuse.

I’ve been telling myself this a lot, recently. That I don’t have an excuse. That I need to stop this. I tell myself again as I take a breath and close my computer for the night. I tell myself it’s time to go to bed and I’ll start over on making things better tomorrow. I lift my eyes. But it’s then that, with a prick of shock, I catch my reflection staring back at me in the blackness of the T.V. screen.

Loneliness is still time spent with the world.

These last two months have felt like the world around me has been crumbling. Aside from feeling so alone every waking moment, things just tend to keep getting worse and worse. It all culminated when suddenly I was holding my cat’s paw as I had to watch the light fade from his eyes due to an out-of-left-field cancer diagnosis just minutes before. Watching an animal you raised and spent almost every minute with, in multiple states, be so confused and scared is heartbreaking. For once, I felt powerless, I didn’t have a solution, I couldn’t save him. I was unable to breathe or have cohesive thoughts. I stumbled out of the vet into the glaring sunlight of Queens, sunglasses tucked away in my pocket. The sun blinded me, only adding to the disorienting feeling I was already going through.

I was having awful thoughts swirl in my head. I needed to drown them out. I ran two blocks, tears streaming down my face like a riptide as I entered a Target and bought a pair of headphones. A friend quickly called me mid-checkout and through a mumbled, emotional voice, I was able to get out “I’m not ok this isn’t the time I need to go”. I plugged the headphones in and began to blast Jacob and the Stone, from the Minari score.

I was feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness, dogpiled on top of the sadness I was already experiencing. I stumbled throughout Queens, unable to control my emotions. People passed by me like fleeting shadows. To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. I ended up by The East River, having an unintentional Kendall Roy moment. I sat down and sobbed for what felt like ages. The weight of my life crashing down on me. Silas, the last bit of sanity that I felt like I had left, drifted away from me as I crouched on the cold floor shaking uncontrollably as the life left him.

I then checked my phone.

An outpour of support. Close friends, casual friends, people I’ve barely talked to. All reached out to me to send their love, offer condolences, and be there for me. For the first time in 2 months, I didn’t feel alone.

I am my harshest critic. I never fully believed that I’ve had an impact on people. That my kindness and generosity and love are what should be expected out of people. But maybe I have made an impact. Maybe what I do and say to others is beyond your typical everyday affection. These last two months, my friends tried reaching out to me, to show affection. However, the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was indirectly or directed at me. There are times when I don’t choose healing. I’m too stubborn for that. I choose self-destruction instead of hoping that I will learn what it’s like to have wounds again. And I learn and learn and learn again.

For trauma, I felt as if I was being haunted by a past I could never go back to. In that brief moment though, on that bench in Queens, the facade faded. I have loved so hard and lost so much these last two months, and for kindness to still prevail, seems like a miracle.

Loneliness aside, the feelings of anguish, grief, and sadness still prevail. I don’t feel as if I’m alive anymore, that I’m just existing. This life that I have been dealt with is a treacherous one.

Do you ever feel like you’ve fucked up somewhere in life a long time ago? That you’re living the wrong life? That this current life is a bad version of the life you were supposed to live?

That’s the thought that has been on my mind recently. All this pain and suffering has made me question whether it’s all worth it. I wish pain and absence didn't take the place of loss.

I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am. But I’ll always have the day Silas left me as a reminder that I’m never fully alone.