The evening come-apart
and a joyful merge
Almost three years ago I made a huge change in my life, one that I wanted, and I’ve embraced the time alone afforded by that change. After all these months I’m certainly comfortable in the world I’ve created for myself, and I thoroughly enjoy my solo coffees, trips where and when I feel like taking them, and quiet evenings.
Others seem to talk a lot about community, how people are oh-so-lonely these days, and how can we avoid friendship dips and come-aparts of friend groups? I love my friends and my friend groups but I don’t seek new people out too often. When my daughter suggested attending the community garden potluck, I experienced a surge of anxiety and told her no way, unless she came. Oftentimes when I’m with a friend in any kind of social atmosphere I’ll encourage him or her to make the first overtures to others while I hang back and say nothing if possible.
Often, I simply stay home, and I mostly enjoy that…until I don’t. Sometimes, despite my best efforts at finding contentment in solitude, loneliness creeps in.1 I try an audiobook but it feels contrived and outside my experience. Switching to a favorite playlist uplifts my mood for a song or two and then I’m right back to thinking about being alone. From time to time I’d like to have someone around besides myself and my cats in the house. Someone to chat with in person, someone to dirty up a dish. Someone whose energy hangs in the room even after they depart.
Not wanting to follow that line of thought during a recent episode of melancholy, I ventured out for an evening walk through the darkened neighborhood and passed through the collection of identical houses down the block where nobody ever seems home. The muted star groups overhead called out their names, Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper, though I want to learn other names for them, and the stories that go with those names. I stood a while and stared across the cemetery at the new, enormous housing development just under the freeway, its hallways and stairwells brightly lit, and thought of all the people soon to become residents, living so close together, stacked like pallets in a warehouse.
I meandered home, kicking at some leaf piles left curbside for the city’s machines to collect. I love the scent of dry leaves and a small mountain of them makes a lovely, crackling-dry aroma. Back in my living room, I sat smelling a sage bundle on a shelf for a while and tried to think positive thoughts. Then I tackled a cabinet and two drawers containing too much junk and in purging that stuff managed to improve my mood another notch or so.
I texted my sister that I felt mopey and she called to offer me another cat.2 Later one of my kids called, and while I was on the phone with him, the other kid called. So I hit the magical “merge calls” button on my phone and all three of us chatted. We discussed the son’s fender-bender and the daughter’s swordfighting adventures as well as deranged landlords overcharging for rent.
A balm it was.
I know…I’ve chosen to live alone, I often choose to avoid meeting people, I choose to work from home and to not watch TV. I don’t really have space to whine about being lonely. But humans aren’t robots and emotions aren’t logical and so, I’m whining.
A joke…we communicate mostly through humor.
I think it is better to choose solitude and occasionally feel lonely than to force yourself to be social and end up feeling lonely while surrounded by other people.
"Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.” — Donald Hall