What kind of alone are you?
1: there’s the kind of aloneness where the question must be asked:
is there no one around you,
or are you by yourself?
2: the aloneness of falling asleep in an apartment somewhere in Bombay:
the elevator has coughed someone up, your neighbour turns his key in the door, you feel a gentle weight on your bed as your cat pads in, it’s mid-October and the air is thick-heavy-hot and despite your overworked, protesting fan doing its best you’re wide awake and you think of your client who calls October a ‘second summer’ a bonus season to sell his ice-creams, and this makes you walk to the fridge for cold water and as you sit on the couch sipping that water you hear a car door slam and look outside your window just as someone turns their lights off in an apartment so close you could shout out and ask them to stay up with you but you walk back to bed and slip in and out of slivers of sleep, almost pick up your phone but push it away wisely, and think of that thing that you must not think of not now not at 1:40 am please no, and so you think of things that lull you to sleep, like the memory of someone you loved long ago- a comforting thought to drift into and leave for the peace of a restful sleep.
3: conditional aloneness:
you’d rather wake up alone than fall asleep alone.
3: the aloneness of witnessing beauty:
one morning when you weren’t around I woke up early and saw a peacock outside the window. the grass was damp and glimmered beneath the peacock that moved slowly like a spell or a bird in a Sorrentino movie- full of some kind of spiritual grace. and being as we are and as I am, I wanted to find you and say “can you believe this?” and share this joy with you so it became real. so I attempted to call you but the peacock took off as peacocks do- in an awkward, heavy flap that left the air unsettled.
I learnt then to keep things to myself and later I found that these things have a way of growing into stories and poems. and I didn’t mind it so much, keeping things to myself like a gift.
4: the distance between loneliness and solitude is measured in that shift between getting used to your own company and beginning to like it.
5: pandemic aloneness:
it has taught you things and made you hate bras and avoid the company of those who mean too little to be met.
6: alone in a crowd:
you’re 35 in a gig full of 20-somethings with euphoria-tinted eyes and you are making an effort to dance. everyone laughs and to fit in you try to push out cheer from the pit of your stomach and when it does come up it’s so sharp and brittle that it sticks out. you’re new here and the banter is comfortable and old. you’ve outgrown these people three and a half years ago. you’re grieving and you can sense their need to empathise but you also know this empathy is a fleeting social ritual and only you will carry this grief forever. you’re something they can’t understand because they’re like each other and everyone else.
7: alone vs lonely:
is a choice. and like congenitally lonely Betty Draper said, “only boring people are bored.” and she was right because there are 156,264,880 books in the world and 500,000 movies and a million ways to fill up time because what did we do before the internet enveloped (ensnared) us? some of us blew spit bubbles for hours and thank god we’ve come a long way from that but honestly, there are walks to be had and cats to be watched and so many cafés by the street. like an aunt of mine said, “we come into this world alone and we leave it alone…” so if we’ve already known aloneness, we ought to get used to it. no?
