On Loneliness: To You

Many years ago, I told my then-partner that the worst kind of loneliness was the kind I felt in our relationship. I thought, back then, that the right relationship would mean a lack of loneliness—how could I be lonely if I wasn’t alone, if I loved and was loved back? I told him all this because he wasn’t available in the various ways that I thought he should be; it didn’t occur to me that maybe he wanted to change but couldn’t, or that I had no right to expect change as my due, or that my going on about loneliness wasn’t likely the best incentive for him to try to change, or to want to. I flew on a logic entirely my own, by which my increasing promiscuity was a kind of questing toward union, the apparent opposite of loneliness, the erasure of it, when (though this doesn’t have to be so) promiscuity was just the erasure of immediate hunger (not even desire; less than that), an erasure that became habitual, which is to say, there was solace there for a while, though the loneliness itself only deepened. I blamed my partner for this, too, for hadn’t his detachment led me to this behavior, hadn’t he at one point encouraged it, am I remembering that right? And if I’m not? I left him over a decade ago. He died last year. As I understand it, it’s for me to decide, now, what exactly happened.

Loneliness, for me, has equally little to do with the company of others and with the lack of it. I carry loneliness inside me, I always have, my version of what James Wright, in his poem “The Jewel,” describes as “a blossom of fire”: “When I stand upright in the wind/My bones turn to dark emeralds.” When I stand upright in the absolute openness of vulnerability—let’s call that the wind—there’s an ache that can feel like despair, that I refuse to yield to: I shall call it loneliness, and in naming it, keep it fixed, and my own.

For years I’ve had this song in fairly steady rotation in my head, an instrumental piece from an album called Modern Nature by the Manchester band The Charlatans. The name of the song is “Loneliness,” I’m certain of it, each time, until I check to see if I’m right. Technically, I’m not. The name of the song is “Honesty.” Is there a way, though, in which I’m not wrong to have confused the two? From at least childhood, it’s been intuitive to me to speak honestly about my feelings—I could never help it, even when, almost immediately, I learned that to be honest in this way meant creating, without wanting to, a sort of force field of deterrence all around me. Rarely do people seem to want the truth when it comes to feelings, even when they say they do; children don’t know what to do with it, often enough, and most adults make a clear distinction between being honest about feelings and getting on with one’s life, a thing that too much honesty can easily derail. Being honest in this way means a kind of loneliness because it drives others away.

There’s a flipside to this particular loneliness, not an alternative to it: just another version of it, whereby I’ve learned to keep my truest feelings to myself. I don’t alarm people as much that way; many, in fact, find themselves drawn to the person they imagine me to be, whom I barely recognize: social, loyal, easy to laugh with, reliable—I won’t let you down. The entire time, though, my truest company is an interior one, the company of my own apparently out-of-step-with-the-rest feelings—its own form of loneliness that, as I said, I carry inside me, though it can sometimes seem as if loneliness is carrying me, as if loneliness were a much-repaired wooden boat whose sturdiness I’ve come to trust. Let us make of what’s left a sturdiness we can use to the end, as I’ve somewhere before put it. As for actual people, they’re a lot like ghosts to me. The hero Aeneas tries to embrace the ghost of his father when he encounters him in the underworld. Aeneas forgets what it’s easy to forget when you’re still alive: you can’t hold a ghost. They can’t be touched because at last they don’t want to be, and no, at last, does mean no.

Loneliness, then, means understanding—and accepting, though some days this is only slightly easier than others—that no one knows me. What’s so terrible about that? What help would knowing me be to either of us, at this point? I am shocked to have said this. Even to myself.

“In my solitude you haunt me,” sings Billie Holiday, “With gloom everywhere/I sit and I stare/I know that I’ll soon go mad.” But solitude isn’t loneliness. I don’t feel haunted. There’s no gloom, though etymologically gloom is related to gloaming: twilight, or dusk, my favorite time of day, that liminal space just before darkness, when the unbearable becomes no more distant but a bit more bearable because it’s spared, again, from the light’s relentlessness—easier, therefore, to forget. The unbearable still casts its shadows but, in the gathering dark, they’re diminished shadows. Loneliness thrives here, as if accordingly, as if part of some larger mechanism that includes writing, as it turns out: if I’m going to write, the urge to do so usually stirs around nightfall, though each time I’m surprised all over again. In this regard, I’ve wondered lately if I  require loneliness. Having further estranged myself from people by having trained myself not to share my truest feelings means being alone with those feelings, a situation that would itself be unbearable without a way to negotiate our having to live together, my feelings and I. Maybe the poems are negotiations, brief truces, I don’t know. Maybe loneliness is just another of those veils, like grief, through which the world as I thought I knew it remains visible, only less so. It’s not from loneliness but the resonant ache of it that I’m writing this. To you.