For four months I lived in luxury's lap. Three floors in a four bedroom townhouse overlooking a lake near an ocean. Just me, coronavirus panic, youtube, and ice cream - the most supportive girlfriend I've ever had.
Every day a procrastination until the evening for my single sojourn out, every day a gorgeous walk with the pictures to prove it, then the shower, the trip to the Baskin-Robbins drive-through, the new book I'd fail to read, the new meal I'd fail to cook before just putting more buffalo chicken veggie burgers in the toaster. In four months, not a single in person conversation except for the three days my father was in the house. Just me and the books I'd stare at without reading while the laptop keeps playing the music, the constant presence of social media as the only reliable window to a world past solipsism, and the ever replenished articles of doom.
Lots of IM'ing with friends of course, and occasional zooms and facetimes where I'd get a glimpse of the full rambunction of their children, sometimes the spouses would be there, usually just quickly enough to say hello while they were chasing the kids out of the room so the original friend could have ten minutes uninterrupted quiet time with their manchild friend.
Being in a couple or family and being single seems as though it's an exact opposite experience of coronavirus. One life's journey has no time, the other has infinite time. Time never stops for the former, time never ceases for the latter. To the former, it's an unending series of micro-events happening to them, or else life explodes in chaos; to the latter, it's an unending series of micro-events we have to make happen, or else life shrinks into nothing at all.
While at the beach, the loneliness was certainly present, but in such idyllic surroundings it could never be acute. It was a simple life in a big townhouse overlooking a lake: audiobooks, ice cream, walks, music, IM, veggieburgers, and come on, you know as well as I do..., those occasional occasions in the private windows which unattached people require....
But after three weeks back in Baltimore, the loneliness is so everyday present it's tactile. Life has gone from three floors of well over a thousand square feet to one floor of 675 sq. ft. There's so much more noise, there's so much more to see and experience, there are so many more occasions to speak to people - IN PERSON!!!, and finally, chances to see family and friends, and yet, the loneliness is everywhere, everywhen - the knowledge that at the end of this road, be it in a month or five years, everyone else will be bonded forevermore to the people with whom they shared the most intimate period of their lives. Never again will people get to know each other as well as they have the people with whom they shared the last half year, and however crazy they all drove each other, most of them will love each other all the more for having been so dependent on one other for company, support, and validation. But you, dear Evan Tucker, you shall still be here, by yourself as ever before, continuing your lifelong soliloquy to a handful of internet voyeurs, a lifelong performance in place of a life. After this period is done, those who were truly driven crazy by their partners will be eligible again, and after what they might have gone through, they particularly won't want to take a chance on crazy.
One month ago, your parents were habutally telling you in no uncertain terms how meshuggeh you were about the potential for coronavirus contamination. But all it takes is a few days in Baltimammon for your social distance resolve to fold like a new lawnchair. Whether your old new domicile increases or decreases your chances of corona, even a walk every day through this urban petrie dish will probably do nothing to you. And yet now, you can't just stop with a walk anymore. Instead, it's a new trip to the store every day, and even that's not enough. One day last week, a trip to visit with a friend working inside her store for more than two hours, and even plans to revisit soon. You're helpless as her Trump supporting coworker sneezes 12 feet from you while only half-covering his mouth with his entire mask stuffed beneath his chin. All her co-workers are very friendly and clearly glad to have the company, another one goes in for a fistbump, and as you try to hide the fact that you're immediately sanitizing your hands you realize, this is the only human contact you've had since early March.
You're overcompensating.... You're realizing that all that time alone has made the transition back all the more jarring. You knew you'd have to go back at some point, and now that you've returned, this immediate re-immersion into a very changed home life has made you a little wreckless. You always thought quickly, but never thought clearly, you always thought as much with your Falstaffian gut as you did with your brain, if you were a generation younger you'd fail every marshmallow test the school psychologist ever gave you, not that you'd be seeing her this year... And whatever your gut tells you, you were always so bad at drowning its voice out.
But it's not voices you're hearing around Baltimore, it's helicopters. There are so clearly more of them flying over us now, and more intrusively conspicuous. It takes no voice to tell you what those economic graphs mean. And it takes no voice to tell you that win or lose, Trump's voice and millions of voices like him will be with us until you reach senior citizenship, and by the time you're a senior citizen, the voices of their most implacable foes could be just as loud, and just as lethal. It takes no internal voice to hear of the stories of friends of friends who've died of the virus, the terrors of unemployment, the boarded up businesses on every streetcorner, the omnipresent online rage, and the imminent stories of eviction that will begin just this week. And it takes no voice to notice that even those bound up in loving domesticity are feeling lonelier these days. Whatever comes, if it's truly as bad as we dread, then it will come for the well-connected as well as the lonely, and know little difference between us. It does not know that you have people who depend on you for life and love, and I don't. It seems to know, be it the potential for a second wave of coronavirus or violent insurrection or environmental catastrophe or dictatorship or war, that it is acting out our fantasies of rage and murder for us, but that's just an illusion - perceiving human qualities in the inhuman, like a psychotic brain perceiving patterns within chaos.
But we are not alone, and in many ways, that's clearly as much the problem as it is the consolation. The world is chaos, and when humans demand too much order from it, the world reasserts its chaotic dominion. Loneliness certainly doesn't seem like much of a blessing, but in some ways it is. For the whole age of the internet, America has not been alone. It's been as connected as a dysfunctional family in the coronavirus era - stuck in the same house for years at a time, with nobody being able to ignore the most poisonous traits in each other's character. When a toxic-seeming person tells you that you have poisonous character traits, your most destructive traits begin to seem like virtues, because how can a person who seems venomous be able to tell a virtue from a vice?
What this country needs so desperately is a break from each other. A time out. A cool down period. Perhaps even a trial separation. But the borders have all been closed down, so we're not going to even get that unless we all want to go to Turkey. We're all stuck being unlonely for a while, and rather than being able to go visit friends who are more like us, this country is like a family that hates each other, stuck living together with no way out of dealing with each other every single day for a period of years. And that's the claustrophobic situation that makes people who otherwise would be good act in ways they never think themselves capable.
So if you're feeling lonely like me, try as best you can to be at least a little grateful for it. There are worse life experiences than being lonely. I hope we all never see what they are, but realistically speaking, we all see what they are, and at one point or another, the majority of us experience them. There's much worse out there than loneliness, and right now, they're so close to us for company; who right now can possibly feel lonely?
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