Loneliness as a Moral Imperative
on self-discovery +24h alone in prague
I thought the story should start when they had to throw the drunk man off the train because he had barricaded himself in the bathroom. But then I realized that I don’t want to write about the drunk man, only what he reminded me of, which is my own memory. A shame, the people I make into keys that all turn the same lock.
When I was ten, my mother stepped off a train and left me on it. When the police came for the drunk man, I got off to smoke a cigarette. For a moment I thought about leaving all my shit on the train and letting the train leave me. What would I do then? The question frightened and excited me. When I called her at the hospital that summer, my mother told me that the first thing she did after she left the train was take all her clothes off and go swimming.
But I had gone swimming in Germany already, so I got back on the train.
For many years, I thought myself a lone wolf, most comfortable in myopic silence. It’s true, I create my own worlds and live in them. Sometimes I am even cagey, like a sick cat, wanting to be allowed to crawl under the deck. But I have lived with my boyfriend for the past three years. When I am not living with my boyfriend, I am living with six other people on tour. I see my best friend just about every other day. It’s not pleasant to discover that a story you’ve been telling yourself is categorically, unavoidably false.
I sat on the bed in Prague and realized that I had not had twenty-four hours to myself in years. How could I have believed that I was going it alone all this time?
The question is answerable, at least for me. I know exactly how I could wrap myself in a story, one that theoretically left me more vulnerable than I really was, but actually insulated me from the more terrifying truth — that I loved being around other people, and maybe even needed them.