I find that loneliness comes in waves that surge and break on the shore of my evenings before receding again for a time. The tide is low during the day, when I am too busy and distracted to be too bothered by distance. But high tide flows in most often on weeknights, when there is no one in my apartment but me, and I feel that all my friends are an impossibly long way away in both space and time. I am not used to being solitary for at least five nights a week; to be perfectly honest, I'm not used to being regularly solitary at all. This is the first time I've lived truly alone, without family or friends or roommates a stone's throw away.
I miss Tribe Rivendarth and our merry band of groupies as if a limb had been severed from my body.
I wonder if the insistent sameness of my too-quiet evenings will become cabin fever as time goes by. For now, at least, I find ways to preoccupy myself, though sometimes I acutely miss the presence of another person. I just don't want to get bogged down in routine.
Kowalski: Routine is the silent killer.
Fraser: I thought that was high blood pressure.
Kowalski: No, we changed that.
Fraser: When?
Kowlaski: When you were on vacation.
Perhaps more disheartening is the lack of closeness I feel with any of the friends I have made in Sonobe. I am growing very fond of my friends in Kyoto city, but can only see them on weekends. I know logically that this is the same jump I made in college, to new surroundings and strange people, but I think it was easier to make friends then, living together in a dorm and being forced to socialize in classes. Constant contact and necessity eventually bred some of the best friendships I have today. I wish there was some easy way to replicate that here! I suppose I'll continue to meet the Kyoto crowd whenever I can, and pick up a few hobbies for the empty hours.
I'm not without hope. I'm just adjusting.
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5 comments:
That's a Wittenberg summer your describing.
You haven't been gone too terribly long. School compresses time. Without it things will take longer. You'll have those friends soon.
I think it was Sir Francis Bacon, or "Mr. Bacon" as I like to call him, who said : "Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Take it from me, when you keep only a few friends you start to realize what loneliness can really mean. It's...not really ALL bad. Then again you always DID seem to perk up the more people were around, whereas I got proportionately withdrawn with the increase of the crowd.
Regardless, you know you've got people pulling for you. If there's still people thinking about you, you're not really alone, you're just having some extra "you" time. The presence of people is, as a construct, unneeded to break the loneliness.
"If there's still people thinking about you, you're not really alone, you're just having some extra "you" time."
Wow, that was remarkably encouraging. Immediately upon reading it, I was struck with a sense of, "Oh, now I see! Well, that's okay, then."
Thanks, McCabe. I didn't know you had it in you.
Hey, I know a lot about being alone.
...That sounds way more sad than I meant it to.
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