All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong?

Shortly before Thanksgiving, I had a quarantine buddy for two weeks. We went through ridiculous negotiations: full disclosure of all our activities, enthusiastic consent from my buddy’s household. We had to decide it was okay for us to shack up at my place for two weeks. My buddy’s household set the long stay as one of the requirements to make sure no one got sick once we were exposed to each other.

We’d planned to do it while the weather was still nice, but circumstances required us to delay an additional two weeks wait to make sure I hadn’t been picked something up during an emergency visit with my Mom. The fact that you’re hearing about it after the fact is a testament to how fraught the process was and also, that we Didn’t Want to Fucking Hear It. We required each other’s consent and that of anyone directly affected, and no one else, thank you very much, and god, this is exhausting.

My friend went home having topped up my supply of Human Contact, or so I thought at the time, not having realized how dry that well had become.

Don’t get me wrong, the visit was great! Everyone stayed healthy, we had a lot of good dinners, and we didn’t drive each other crazy. We keep different schedules — and stayed on them — and didn’t get under each other’s feet. The only one a little rattled by another person around was Harley the Dog, and even he started to chill in week two.

My return to solo time has been… okay. I’ve had good visits with friends and I am still swimming.  I can now complete the half mile my time slot allows and it feels close to effortless. You should see my arms, they look amazing. But also, if you read my last post, you’ll see that I narrowly avoided a financial disaster. That has me worried about the mental toll of all this alone time.

One of my local indy radio stations has this new tagline, “You are not alone.” When I hear the deep humanity pouring out of the DJs at KEXP, I’m genuinely touched. But also, they’re wrong, I am alone. If we were truly in this together, we’d have worn masks early on, not politicized the virus, and while we still wouldn’t have a vaccine, we’d have many more things available to us. These voices spilling out of my radio, the friends in my back yard, your delightful emails, don’t change the fact that I go to bed alone every night, I wake up alone every morning. There are specific challenges to that and they do not diminish your challenges, people who do not live alone.

Telling me I’m not alone doesn’t help, plus, it’s not true. We could take a little video tour around my house and I could show you: there is no one else here.

One of the reasons I am getting divorced is my future exhusband seemed to think it was okay to leave me alone for long periods of time. “Oh, great,” I said, while we were still fighting about this, “the reward for being good at being alone is… MORE ALONE TIME!” There is a bitter irony in being forced, by circumstances, in to such a generous helping of solitude.

How long will it be until I can have someone sit at my kitchen table for coffee, inside, without drama? Who knows? No one knows. It will happen, but we do not know when. How long will it be until I can hug my friends, go on a date with a stranger, sit in a bar by myself and have a drink and read my book and maybe talk to the person next to me, or maybe not! Who knows? Until that time comes, I am, indeed, alone, in ways that you, person telling me that I am not alone while having Actual Other Humans in Your House, do not understand.

I tend to avoid memes because they are reductive and often lazy, but every now and then one will surface that speaks to me. For this particular era, I like the one that says “We’re not all in the same boat, but we are in the same storm.” My boat is small and sturdy as hell, and it has a crew of one plus a small dog. Small dog is snuggly at night and good at alerting me to passing non-threats, but his conversational skills are minimal, he can not cook, and he continually fails to vaccuum up the dog hair he sheds about the place. Your crew may be you and your eight year old daughter, or you and your doting partner of many years, or you and a pod you have built and then part of the pod eats all the hard tack and has to be put in a row boat for two weeks until they make amends for their actions or… you get it.

My crew, maybe yours too, is one person, me, and I am alone. When someone has to man the bridge and, hell, I don’t know, I don’t know shit about boats. I get seasick and kind of hate boats, so let’s say they have to raise a second sail, the person who has to man the bridge and raise the sail at the same time is… me. Sometimes the fog will clear and there is another boat near enough that we can have a chat, and they can toss a bottle of whiskey my way and I will toss back a batch of rolls I have baked, and then, they are gone. It was nice, but they do not get to come on board aaaaaand now I have beaten this metaphor to a pulp and will stop.

Had we been more empathetic from day one, we would not be in such a sorry state. The minor inconvenience of a mask would be nothing compared to the safety of our service workers. Those of us skeptical about the virus could have said, “Well, that other person seems to be freaking out, so I can wear the fucking mask for 15 minutes while I shop so they can chill and do their job.” We didn’t do that as a nation and oh, here we are.

It’s been nine months and we’re nowhere near as empathetic as we need to be. I feel it in the well meaning “you’re not alone” remarks, and you probably feel it in other ways. I have moments where I envy my friend who has a service job with the public; he has regular interaction with his co-workers, and he gets to see strangers, something I did not expect to miss so terribly. He also has regular confrontations with people about masks with assholes who will not observe a simple “No shirt, no shoes, no mask, no service” rule. I worry about the risk he places himself in every day because someone thinks they “need” to shop and worse, because our country has not found a way to pay workers to just stay home until the risks are less acute. I would never say “You’re so lucky you have a job where you get to see people all the time!” No. It’s so much more fraught than that. Everything is.

I have such good friends and every day, I am grateful for them. I have work and have been able to pay my bills. I am almostly obscenely healthy, seriously, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this physically healthy. I’m sure my doctor would look at my stats and say “Damn, you’re doing everything right.” My boat (there is this stupid boat metaphor again) is water tight and sound and the crew is comprised of Exactly One Person.

If you are stowed away in some hatch I have forgotten and I am not, indeed, alone, it would be great if you would let me know. I could use the help and the company.