On making friends with loneliness.

I was thinking today about the day in December when I sat with my mom in our house with a cup of tea in one hand and a pad of paper in the other and started outlining what this experience could actually br. I wanted to start scribbling figures and listing out cities and get the part where the big battle of my day would be whether I would order an éclair or crème caramel and oh goodness which pair of shoes should I pack? She took my pad away and asked me what it was I really wanted out of my time. I think the response I gave her was roughly that I wanted to become friends with loneliness.

I’ve spent a large majority of my recent life being alone. Walking in the infinite possibilities of that word, wandering in the echoes of it and expanding daily my own capacity for its continually growing definitions. I’ve sat next to loneliness on just about every subway line in New York city, except maybe the L shuttle, because I don’t trust that train and avoid it if at all possible. It’s echoed in the sound my heels make against the marble floors in the public library on 48th street, and the clacking against the wooden ones in my little branch library back at home in Virginia. When I say that it has kind of become my shadow, I mean that in the way that Peter Pan had a shadow, not in the gloomy “woe is me” sort of way that that would probably come across as otherwise.
My point to all of that is that the concept of loneliness, or maybe simply the act of carrying out life in my own company, has been something I’ve thought a lot about lately. But honestly, at the end of the day, I’ve always believed that quiet is the consolation prize you’re met with when noise and clutter and distracting conversation aren’t available. Or something like that. I wanted to genuinely enjoy, even seek out, my own company. I wanted to share inside jokes with myself. I wanted to stop being scared of silence. I wanted to see what would happen when I took myself away from the crutches I invent to buffer my own fear. I wanted to stare myself in the face and walk away liking what I saw. At the end of the day, when I hand my passport over the counter and step back onto home ground, that’s what I wanted to have accomplished.

I realize that it’s been practically a week since I’ve written a word and I have so many silly stories and pictures to put here and it seems a little ridiculous then that I would sit here for a half hour and ramble about loneliness… but I guess I just wanted to say for the record that when I stared out over the clouds on the way over the ocean, I still didn’t really understand why it had been so damn important to me that I do this strange little pilgrimage that I would spend all my savings and give up my planned little summer at home to trek from hard hostel bed to harder hostel bed every night, and really what on earth HAD convinced me to actually step onto the plane and do it, after all? And just to say… over the past week, I think I’ve figured that out.

And that’s really cool.