I remember loneliness because it is pervasive.

Reads the first line of Athena Dixon’s The Loneliness Files, the book that I am reading by the window tonight as I listen to tires roll against the rainy streets of New York.

It’s such a simple line, yet such a profound concept. The idea of remembering loneliness. Not the loneliness you know today, not the tired eyes you saw on the train or the aching vacancy of the seat next you to, but the remembrance of what it has been to you before. The remembrance of loneliness as you have known it from the dawn of your consciousness.

THE REMEMBRANCE OF LONELINESS

I have spent most of my life alone, swimming through the never ending dimensions of disconnect that I have always felt from my peers. Never the right age at the right time, I learned loneliness like the back of my hand.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the library during lunch in elementary school, reading, listening to the older girls gossip at the table next to me. I didn’t yet have the words to describe that feeling. I didn’t yet know what I would come to learn in the years that followed. All I knew was that they looked at me like I might break and I never understood why. From where I stood, needing a friend with you at every possible moment of the day was a far more fragile state to move though the world in. But understanding that came later.

At the time, I was internalizing that look. The one that comes over people’s faces when they see you sitting alone. It was the same one that I saw throughout all of my school years, from the alphabet carpet of the third grade to the cracking concrete of the wall I read Sylvia Plath against in high school. Except, by then, I had long since come to terms with what Dixon explains so well.

IT JUST IS

She writes,

I think alone is sexy. Mysterious in its heaviness. Alone seems like a choice. Loneliness doesn’t.

My loneliness is not groundbreaking, though. And it is not tragic. It just is. I turn it over like something precious in my hands—carefully as it floats through my fingers so I can see the details of it.

By the time I had grown up, I had developed the kind of intimate relationship with my solitude that Dixon refers to. It became something complex, multifaceted, aching, and brilliant. It was a beautiful thing to study under the light, to dissect with the precision one employs when coming to understand who they are. It was something I chose. I picked apart the pieces and pressed them between the pages of my journals, year after year, until I too arrived at that critical juncture of enlightenment that catalyzes liberation from the shame that our world has hand sewn into the hem of solitude.

That is, at understanding the distinction between aloneness and loneliness.

Aloneness is a physical state of being. It can be seen, witnessed, and recognized by the eye. But loneliness is an abstraction, an extrapolation of a mind severed from it’s surroundings, cut off from a world that it can reach out and touch without feeling a thing. It is intangible, invisible, and therefore utterly insidious in the way that all outwardly incommunicable experiences are. If aloneness is a laceration across your abdomen, gushing for the world to see, loneliness is your gut internally bleeding.

Not to give in to negative connotations of either, for Dixon’s central thesis is that both are intricate experiences of profound revelation if you let them be. As much as it ached and sliced at me to have never truly connected with my peers as a child and adolescent, I don’t think I would have been able to pack up and move alone across the country to a city where I know no one if I hadn’t experienced those years in the ways that I did—on my hands and knees, crawling through with eyes wide open.

REMEMBER ME

And it’s funny, being here now. For I have never been more alone, yet I have never been less lonely.

I run around New York, sitting on trains and dodging honking cars in intersections, entirely alone, yet so incredibly far from it. The deeper into the city I wander, the more history I find. It keeps me company. There are stories scrawled on every corner, stories so old that I feel like an infant in the womb of it all, my lungs still just developing into organs that can inhale at full capacity without choking on fire escapes and cobblestone streets. Crumbling bricks and neon graffiti.

There is an overwhelming sensation of company that comes over me from that much history where I swear I can almost feel all of the lives that have been lived here, right here on this corner, long before mine. Which naturally lends itself to the projection of all of the lives that have yet to be lived, right here, long after mine. And so I am swimming through this surreal moment of the in between, of the present, straining to not let it fall from grasp.

Dixon discusses her own experience of this through her intense fear of being forgotten, of dying and leaving no trace. You stand on those streets and you ask them to remember you. You ask them to hold onto the memory of your feet walking upon them after getting your first apartment, your first job. You are holding nothing in your hands and you are but one speck of dust to that city but you ask it to remember you anyway.

Will you remember me anyway.

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