Solitude/Loneliness
on A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Back in January, I had a tender conversation with two of my closest friends about solitude and loneliness. I think we all have been told in one way or another that being alone and lonely are mutually exclusive. “Solitude is a conscious choice,” I said to them, and it has never felt anything less than liberating and restorative. But being surrounded by new friends, entering this bustling industry, while being at the tail end of being estranged from a long-time companion can be overwhelming. I feel deprived of sincere connections. “Not being profoundly understood can feel alienating”, I told them, to which they replied: you know as well as I that it is too monumental of an expectation. What a wise bunch, my friends are.
Perhaps it will always be a dream unfulfilled, rustling around in my mind begging for my attention every now and then. I find a strange solace in this. “The melancholy of this possibility is cathartic,” I professed to one of them in a cab ride. My friend laughed, and muttered a curse at my sombre admission. What an inane sense of misery, I thought, and suddenly I could not help but to laugh with her. As I listened to this shared, somewhat misplaced joy, I knew I was understood - profundity be damned.
I was filled, instantly, with a kind of gratitude - a kind of indebtedness, really - towards this sense of recognition that is given to me. I knew then and there that this is perhaps more than I would ever deserve in this lifetime. “And yet, he reminds himself, loneliness is not hunger, or deprivation, or illness: it is not fatal. Its eradication is not owed him,” Hanya Yanagihara wrote in A Little Life, and I stirred. She continued –“He has a better life than so many people, a better life than he had ever thought he would have. To wish for companionship along with everything else he has seems a kind of a greed, a gross entitlement.”
I looked at my friend, glued to her phone screen in the cab, her profile hazy under the dim streetlight. She groaned, showing me the latest antic from someone she briefly dated. As she swirls into her perky self, bubbling with chat, I eased into the seat and hoped that she too found in me understanding: flawed and limited, as they all are, but steadfast as fate allows.
