Lonely Reminders
Confessions from an Ex-Nomad
It’s a normal day like any other, I wake up, take a shower, brush my teeth, and make a morning cup of something to start my day — then I noticed a mug beside mine that’s rarely used. It’s collecting dust and it belongs to my dad who doesn’t live here for most of the time like I do. It’s his coffee mug that he’d use to drink his brewed coffee at 4pm after coming home from the mosque where he’d pray the late afternoon prayer. Looking at this grey and black mug, I feel my dad’s absence more than ever and I miss him and I can’t wait to see him again.
I’ve been getting these sudden lonely reminders a lot lately. Most people have moved on from work-from-home systems but since I’m not most people, I stay at home alone. I see traces of people I used to frequently see around me in the photographs of my uni friends hung up on my wall, the toy dinosaur which belonged to my baby cousin who lives elsewhere now, signed postcards of beautiful places from beautiful people, my mum’s ceramic plate set for special occasions kept inside the top kitchen drawer, and the cinema tickets from cinema dates with my friends pinned to my notice board. Sometimes I feel the silence that follows after I’ve hit pause on my lo-fi music playlist mocking me for how alone I’ve become. My own house, and even this city, feels like it’s somehow betraying me because I haven’t felt like I could seamlessly integrate myself into it. Instead of feeling like I belonged, I feel rejected, alienated, and ultimately unloved.
In Olivia Laing’s book ‘The Lonely City’, she describes the empty and embarrassing feeling of loneliness as a child waling: “I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held.” This imagery reminds me of Mitski’s lyrics “Yet now I find / I've grown into / A tall child” in her song ‘First Love / Late Spring’, my favourite Mitski song. I sometimes see a scared little child inside the body of of mid-twenty-year-old woman when I look in the mirror. It’s one thing to be alone but to be consciously aware of this fact felt shameful. I’m tired of feeling shame, and yet it might be worthwhile to work through the shame by examining this lonely phenomenon in order to free myself from it.
It’s a normal day like any other, I wake up alone, take a shower, brush my teeth, and make a morning cup of something to start my day alone. In this state, after I’ve worked through the shame and guilt of feeling like I’ve failed myself (which I haven’t, not even close), I feel neither defeated nor empowered, I just feel very human.
“…loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.” — Olivia Laing in ‘The Lonely City’
