I spent the weekend achingly lonely. So much so that it was hard to swallow.
Friends were busy or stood me up so I was left floundering in my solitude that suddenly didn’t feel so freeing anymore.
My best friend is a 12 hour drive away, so there isn’t any driving over to her house to do nothing, or getting coffee and rewatching Anastasia like we used to when we were roommates. I miss when she was just a hallway away. I have my love here with me, but it’s not the same. I never wanted to be the person whose world shrank and revolved solely around a partner. There is a need for love, and a need for friendship. I don’t know how to explain that it is different other than saying that it is.
So I took a risk—texted an out-of-town sort-of friend who happened to be in town. I never do this. Initiate. We had conveyor belt sushi with the friend she was in town to visit. They chatted, mostly. I didn’t know what to say. At the end we hugged and she said it was good to see me. I was convinced she was faking it. On the drive home I sank into the self-hating, all-too-convincing spiral. Incapable, unworthy of connection. Incapable. Unworthy.
On Sunday night I called my sister who’s home from college, and when she picked up she was having dinner with my parents, and I didn’t particularly want to talk to my parents. My mom’s voice in the background—Why don’t you sound as excited to see us as we are to see you? When my sister called me back two hours later I didn’t know what to say.
I kept thinking, I need to write about it, to figure it out, process it in the way I best know how, but writing doesn’t fill the void of wanting someone to know you and see you and want to be around you for no reason other than wanting to be there.
I’m sure there is a reason for all this—that social media has pulled us out of our bodies and into the virtual black hole that is the internet, that American society has ridden us of all third spaces in which to meet people and connect and find community, that the pandemic pushed us even further apart and young people have grown up without knowing how to have friends. I’m sure it’s all true, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
It didn’t used to be like this. I thought I was good at it, once. Funnily enough, I think I was the best at having friends in middle school. Maybe it’s because everyone is awkward and socially anxious at that age, or maybe it’s because I had the best friends.
I wasn’t cool, obviously. I was in band and Girl Scouts, on the track and cross country teams, and could never shut up about dystopian YA. It was also 2011, the early days of the internet, where access was contained to a chunky monitor in my family’s living room or a classmate’s iPod Touch they smuggled out to recess. I didn’t have a phone yet, and had just begged my mom to let me get an email (and naturally I chose the most embarrassing handle known to man, just because I needed everyone to know I was different).
But R & D & I had been friends since second grade, or something like that. Actually, it must have been second grade, because that’s when R transferred to our K-8 Catholic school and we were all in the same class. We trudged through middle school in a pack, sharing looks and laughs only preteen girls can understand.
We sent each other Polyvore outfits and those stupid email chains (forward to 10 people or you’ll have 10 years of bad luck!—we believed it) and snuck onto Tumblr when our parents weren’t around to see. Read fanfiction and wrote stories we pretended were true on some obscure site where we all had fake names, I can’t remember what it was called. We all had a crush on the same boy—tall, brunette, birthmark peppered across his cheek like a pink carnation. Once, we made a fake Facebook account (our parents wouldn’t let us have our own) and made up a backstory, pretended she went to our school just so we could friend him and see his pictures. When 1989 came out we listened to it on the CD player, mouths hanging open. A couple mornings ago I woke with “I Wish You Would” stuck in my head. I think every time I get lonely they drift into the back of my head—R & D & me at thirteen, alive and hungry for feeling.
New Year’s Eve 2013, a couple minutes to midnight, we were lying on the floor of R’s bedroom eating ice cream from the carton. I think it was mint chocolate chip, but I could be making that up. We were talking about how it was all about to change. That year we would graduate eighth grade, leave our private school with its grey skirts and sweater vests and go off to different high schools. We were all so scared. Then when the fireworks started we ran out and down the street, barefoot, and let ourselves forget about it for a while.
When I think of R & D, I think of our heads pushed together in some teenage girl huddle up, strategizing late into the night. There was never a question of knowing or not knowing what to say. There was only sharing, asking, dreaming together. I think we were all soulmates on some level.
What a gift to have known love and friendship before the world was entirely revealed to us, before the curtain was pulled back and we could see it for all its hurt and horror. Before it came time to grow into ourselves and all we were expected to be. Before the internet became this ever-present Thing that demands attention like a wailing child. Before loneliness crept in on Saturday nights like allergy season—too early and seemingly terminal.
Eleven years later our heads have drifted from the huddle, shifted sideways as time tends to do, formed new lives across a couple states. They were at my wedding and I wish I could have spoken to them longer. We haven’t been together since. But once, we were alive together, searching for something we didn’t know how to name. We must have found it, New Year’s Eve 2013. Love and wonder and life interwoven between our halting breath and shaky hands, the worry it would all go away. It did, and then we found it again.
Where I’ve been finding solace
Daily: knowing work will ease up soon and I will have a chance to rest, baking funfetti cupcakes & falling asleep with the fan running
Media: My summer playlist—a driveway sunbathing, sticky otter pop, Hannah Montana kind of summer
Words:
My new apartment building looms ahead, dark gray, like the sky behind and the street below. Is an ancient city sidewalk harder than others because of millions of footsteps pressing it down over time? Is it possible that drinking too much coffee on an empty stomach and facilitate a person’s propensity for doubt? Why does rain fall unevenly but still feel like it hits you all at once? - Loneliness & Company, Charlee Dryoff
We are so pinned down on Earth. If I had been there, I would have been the loudest screamer. I am still the loudest screamer. I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. Does that mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail. - Hot Milk, Deborah Levy
Where had I got to in my own life by trying to please everyone all the time? Right here. Wringing my hands. - Hot Milk, Deborah Levy
Here’s hoping we find it again,
Helena
here’s to hoping we find it again indeed 🫂