The Only Living Boy in New York

Here is what happened today. That’s the best way, so the only way, to begin:
I woke up at a friend’s house, early, with morning mouth and no toothbrush. The sun was rising with me when I tiptoed out the front door and down the block, eclipsed then underground while I waited for the first of two trains to take me home. I was sleepy. A little blind. Wearing the clothes from the night before, which is, as always, ‘another story’. The quotations there are glib and a little stupidly ironic. Don’t think too hard about them or the two sentences following.

I walked into my empty, chilly apartment and had some trouble breathing. Then I went to sleep. When it was time to wake up in an hour and a half, I was almost able to pretend that I’d been in my bed all night long and unusual things had happened during the previous night and day, unpredictable and unprecedented things. I set the water as hot as it could go in the shower and then, like most days, I jumped in the tub quickly and jumped right back out again because I’d burned my skin. By now the sun was high in the sky, hanging over Manhattan, but it still felt a bit like sunrise because the light was so cold and so colorful streaming down between the patches of autumn leaves in tall trees. I made breakfast, I put on some clothes, I put a few things in a bag and then made a big production of yelling ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ to no one.

I wish now, already, that I’d thought to write down what I was thinking when I was thinking it during the day -- I see now, already, how even old minutes are robbed of their sincerity viewed backwards from a present mood. Right now, I listen to bluegrass and yawn and think about ways I could make this all very profound very quickly. I think about eccentric, half-baked metaphors that might service. I think about itemized lists of objects and encounters and artwork, lists that might do the work for me of shedding light on the elusive subject (bewildered fragments?) crux of this…piece. At some point today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’ because I have been assigned to read it for a class. I decided that if the book is as profound as it could be I like it and if it is not, I don’t. It registers that this is a stupid kind of opinion, one lacking panache and real drive, but I hold on to it anyways. I write it down now with an intention not so divorced from the ‘Shit-Shit-Shit I’m so laaaaate!’ ploy this morning -- asserting my personality in case anyone’s watching who would really enjoy It and care to say something agreeable or laugh or wave frantically at me across a train platform in concurrent response.

Here I go. I’m psyching up for the word itself. You are possibly very confused, untrusting, wary that what comes next will be presumptuous, predictable, pseudo-intellectual bullshit at best, many bad things. It is an honest thing, at least. The word is lonely. I’m exploring it in my mouth. Have you ever noticed that ‘lonely’ sounds like a swallow? Not the bird, but the gesture. It also sounds like a single fork clinking against a porcelain dish, or a solo saxophone far away, or eavesdropping on two old friends talking about something easy and great. There are a lot of things it isn’t, too, just so we’re clear -- it isn’t explicitly the two trains to get home in the morning. It isn’t directly to do with the other story, the one about the party last night. I’ll shake my head and correct you if you try to bring in the bluegrass or the sunrise or the trouble breathing. Lonely doesn’t walk around and behave logically, it doesn’t flatten or crush or do anything active, which is something I realized today, perhaps. It doesn’t make sense. It seems like it should be much older and wiser than twenty and a little girl. Mostly, lonely sags and underperforms, lonely’s impotent. It wants nothing and it’s uses are few.

I know a lot of people who claim they are lonely -- and I respect them because it isn’t an easy or socially acceptable thing to admit. In my experience, that act of admitting loneliness falls into one of two camps: 1) jolly self-deprecation/defense mechanism for single people surrounded by couples OR 2) Very Serious, Melancholic, Emo, See A Therapist. In a way, these social constructions makes perfect sense. Who wants to talk about being lonely at the dinner table? Who wants to really allow that kind of vulnerability, especially when the merit of doing so is virtually impossible to see? I could tell you I’m lonely, inactively and lamely, and there is not even the allowed hope that anything will come of it. You will know a pathetic part of my soul you perhaps already knew or didn’t want to know, necessarily, suddenly. I will have said it aloud and it will be real. But loneliness is not patently ‘curable’ or even ‘pitiable’ like another kind of problem, though I guess the former could often engender or imply the latter. In and of itself, loneliness is not an illness. It’s a religion: “I guess we’re all of us, more or less lonely and there’s no help for it” (A Cited Source).

Yet it doesn’t seem that everybody could be, especially since that vague holy grail for the lonely (okay, me) is being loved and in love and some people are those things. It’s supposedly possible to be lonely and loved and in love all at once, but this is a completely unsympathetic perspective to someone who is lonely alone, so I will speak for those I consider my people and not address these others, who we‘ll henceforth call ‘Greedy Bastards‘. If so many of Us, the Lonely Alone, shouting to empty apartments and telling no one useless stories of failed evenings, do feel folded folded folded folded up inside ourselves (this is what I feel), I guess I’m now tasked to ask, in a rallying cry, why no one’s mailing their orgy invitations or striking up heart-to-hearts with passersby. They tell me this life is an active exercise, it’s wanting, it’s having soul enough to show terror to someone else. You, if you’re like me, are so convinced you have a soul. It’s burying you, in fact. Is looking-for-love a scapegoat? A social pressure? What’s that honest hunt for a witness about, as ever, and why? So? Serious.

Not as far away, a nighttime S train rumbles up or down Franklin Avenue carrying people a short distance, some of them to a train I know for a fact isn‘t running right now. What will the poor believers in the C do when they realize they‘ve been adandoned? My roommates, returned from a weekend away, flutter papers or cough to prove they’re existing (just like me) in this big, drafty space. We must hear one another, surely. I’m listening for them, anyways.