Lonely in the crowd
I spent yesterday alone in a foreign city. That’s not quite right, of course. It was a city, after all. I had a lovely chat with a man who made me a smoothie and a confusing conversation with an overworked woman in charge of the sale and distribution of baked goods. Not alone, then. Lonely and alone are different things.
Public Service Announcement: sometimes lonely is the feeling that reminds you what lonely isn’t.
I know. That’s not the clearest explanation of what I mean. Let me explain.
I was walking through this foreign city and I passed a protest in the streets. Flags and speeches and chanting. A smattering of officialdom watching on in bored indifference. I overheard, as I walked past two security guards who were looking on at this crowd, a conversation between the two of them. ‘But that’s what they’re protesting, brother,’ said one of them to the other. It was genial, it was firm, it wasn’t defensive. The other security guard listened, his face open and curious. It was lovely. It was warm. It did not include me, but this somehow made it more potent. These were people grouped together questioning the system and these two were quietly discussing their differences of opinion. In witnessing these attempts at human togetherness, I realised how valuable it was, and how right in that moment, I didn’t quite have it.
I ate lunch alone in a cafe and overheard a conversation between the baristas. You know when people work together, they have a little shorthand, they have things that need to be done, and they have, sometimes, intimate friendships situated only between shift hours? This was a perfect example of that. ‘Is this the second time he’s said that to you?’ one of them asked another. ‘Third actually,’ replied someone tea-towelling a tulip cup. There was a third staff member cleaning a bench, whose opinion seemed to hold more weight than the others. This one shook her head. ‘I’m sorry Darcy,’ she said, hurling the cloth into a sink and leaning on the bench with her arms crossed, ‘but who thinks that’s an okay thing to say. To anyone. Ever. In the world.’ It wasn’t a question. I pretended to be absorbed in the newspaper that was on the bench near where I was waiting for my coffee and listened to the pause before Darcy responded to this. It was a large pause. It was the kind of pause I couldn’t generate in this town, as I don’t know anybody well enough. It was a pause pregnant with opinion and caution and care and tension. It was a pause that didn’t know what was coming next.
The way we communicate these days is pretty incredible. I can summon my entire family’s faces through a FaceTime in a moment. I can watch them, which I have done, in the spaces with which I am so familiar that usually, they irritate me. That jumper is on the floor. I really should get new carpets. But there they are, in a FaceTime call, my utterly loved family members, driving each other crazy, arguing and leaving jumpers on the floor and shouting things off-screen to each other and it is this, not photos of them smiling while eating ice cream on summer holidays, that makes me miss them the most.
One can be lonely in one’s own home town of course. The easiest place to be lonely is when you’re bed-bound or separated from other people or you’re missing someone or you’re sick. The difficult thing to remember, though, is that the lonely moments are serving to remind you to treasure the bits when you’re not lonely. You don’t need to treasure the jumper on the floor or the nosy workmate or the harried woman in the bakery. But being unlonely is the kind of gift we never remember to hold in the palm of our hands and admire.
Darcy is okay, by the way. The big pause was followed by a big breath in and a half-turn, slightly coy maybe, and the words ‘I know. I agree. I said that to him. Which is why I’m taking Noah with me to opening night.’ Let me tell you, when sink-lady and tulip-cup-guy lifted their arms high and walked in slow, dramatic circles of celebration, I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You dark horse’, the other one said to Darcy, and winked at me across the bench top. Lonely no more.