Gen X Loneliness

Today my cycle coach played this song...She chanted amongst the words a spell of reassurance and permission. I felt my eye sockets burn, my nose smart, the heroic sensation of being cared for.

Here I am, with my little sis, my mom, and our soon to be (lovely, thank godx) step-father.

Lonely

This planet tends to get so woe-is-me

And 'round and 'round we go, so lonely

So sometimes, we just need to scream

              --scream! by Judah and the Lion

Today my cycle coach played this song. She had all of us stand pedaling and close our eyes as we listened. She chanted amongst the words a spell of reassurance and permission. I felt my eye sockets burn, my nose smart, the heroic sensation of being cared for.

In the past week or so, it has become apparent that a feeling I believed was mine alone is broadly shared.

Yesterday, I dreamed I read an article on CNN about this new life-threatening epidemic.

England appointed a Minister of Loneliness.

Japan began the Loneliness Initiative.

But this is old news.

Awareness dawned during our shelter in place years. I remember that first month, how I wept in the arms of a sturdy little pine along my dog walk.

Days during Covid I was undone by Italians singing to each other on their balconies, by a musician live streaming one of my favorite songs from her living room, (by nurses, any image of nurses), an astronaut on a satellite singing “Space Oddity” in memoriam to David Bowie.

Here am I floating 'round my tin can

Far above the moon

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do

Now, streaming apocalypse stories: Station 11, Murder at the End of the World, True Detective-Night Country, the isolated, solitary characters echo that lonely feeling. But as a Gen X-er, there is a familiarity to this latch key feel, this long walk kicking a stone, this coming home to an empty house.

It is not entirely miserable.

There’s a delicious melancholy, a stormy sky, swollen clouds, trees spreading their arms for rain, the first booms and strikes of lightning on the far horizon. Maybe this was the vibe that brought us together in 1985 with the musicians of our childhood to end hunger, for Africa, singing (was Stevie Wonder crying?) “We Are the World.”

For me, it's a 1981 feeling.

Today’s loneliness goes back to 6th grade, right after we left my dad and moved away from the Trinity River (where I was solitary, but always with the land and all that flies, swims, flows, crawls, sits, grows, blooms). I remember walking the streets of our new town with this steady ache in my chest. I was so tough.

This week, my mom shared a set of devastating pictures from that time. She pointed out my body language. (My little sister looks so wise and deep. She still makes those expressions.) I writhe, arch away, make faces, ever so perceptibly stiff, I refuse connection. The only person I could trust was my mom! Was she going to leave me for this man? We had just survived an apocalypse.

If I were not so in touch with my eleven-year-old sorrows these days, I would think: quelle brat (sounds less mean in French...Holly Go Lightly French). But I remember what this kid felt. In the time travel miracle of memory, my body feels as if it is only today. That I am just now walking home from school to that dark new house with the back yard of berry brambles and the little creek that ran back there where I practiced whipping like Indiana Jones, with a rope I found.

She’s the girl who waited, sitting on the dumpster in front of her new rental, waiting for her father to pick her up on her eleventh birthday. For hours. Until it was dark and her mom, who had been pacing within, came out to bring her in for cake.

I call this inner child Luce. She is a neat freak. In those days, she could not sleep unless there was no mote of dust on her blank dresser in her immaculate yellow room in her great grandmother’s maple bedroom set. I think of myself capturing the last mote with a licked finger, then getting into the smooth, cool sheets.

It is also the time I was discovered by my teacher to be a writer. Shirley Johnson, my sixth-grade teacher who loved books and cats and me, saved my life a little bit.

The funny thing about loneliness: I do not dare come clean about it, lest someone feel pity—or worse, try to fix it, attempt to fill the space. The void has a particular shape, feel, sound, smell. It may be that she will never come. This missing friend. It may be that I am the only one to fit. It may be only a goddess of the wild who can stand in the hole in my whole.

Or a queen from Carthage or Ais in the fiction I am writing.

A few days ago, snow shoeing.

The iced over land looked suffocated. Blue shadows were cut through with sharp sun. The blank snow was littered with dark branches on a pock marked surface. Yet the woods were filled with the sounds of the birds, joyful building and planning for spring—their chatter was such a racket! A final jeering of ravens, then blessed silence except wind, birds gone.

It did not make sense to go on, but she did. She saw herself in the third person. She tried to be friendly at the pine bristled fingers that reached, stinging, to prick her. She aimed for the feeling that they meant well, are kind, that they know her and see her back.

Something shifted. Anticipation came in the far-off sound of wind like surf, like a river flowing, the whir and trill of birds some distance away now. Sunlight lifted off the white.

Then, I came home and lay on my bed in my soft room where I listened to a meditation I had recorded. Tend it said. Maybe your inner child needs comforting touch, a hand on your heart, a hand on your cheek.

I tried this hand on my cheek. My palm was cool on down. I tried two hands. My chin pressed down in the cradle made by the heels of my hands. My little fingertips rested along the sides of my eye sockets.

It felt like I see you. It felt like I see you. It felt like I see you.

Luce. I see you. Heather.