When I get a driver’s license I will fly to a land of long straight roads. I will rent an automobile, put on some Springsteen, and I will cruise. At some point, there will be a gas station, and I will roll up, park and go inside, the door will creak. I will pick out a sandwich and a fizzy drink and approach the counter, and I will feel like a king.
Far from everything, where nobody knows my name.
*
The quandary of alone time.
Some crave it, some fear it, some people have none of it, some people live swamped by it.
As someone who loved to roll around solo in his twenties beating the drum of his own self-containment, freewheeling into town on a Sunday to slurp the froth of a cappuccino and gaze out at the street, cross legged from a bench, wanting mostly for the one thing that never happened, for someone to walk by and find me, I would say I eventually got so used to it I began to love it.
I wore it like a badge of honour, my self-sufficiency was my greatest virtue, my therapist was like it’s fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, we sparred back and forth, but I can count on one hand the times in my life I’ve felt lonely.
When I think harder it was probably to get the hell away from threat. My old man and brother were loud-mouthed titans of men whose latino blood was always close to the boil, and being on the receiving end of it all too often I figured if I was alone nobody could hurt me.
So the petrol station fantasy felt like peace.
Out there no-one could make me feel something I didn’t want to feel.
I’m one of the most solitary people I know. But now, just turned 41, waking up on yet another misty morning hugging a pillow, is it time to remove the lone finger from my derrière. Is there a right way to live, surrounded by people. What if you’re surrounded by assholes. Better to be alone and good, than in company and isolated.
*
The case against LONELINESS
There I was loading up my supermarker shop for one. 3 bean salad. Iced coffee. A brace of avocados. 2 tubs of hummus. Corncakes. Spicy Calabrian paste. This was dismal. My life needed a reboot, the self-sufficiency was chilling.
Looking over I felt a familiar energy by the checkout. A withered old oak of a man, queuing for the till, stash for one. I shuddered, saw my future looking back at me.
The thing about being fine alone is that it’s wrapped up with a conviction that should you want to depart your own company you could do it in a flash. Loneliness is processed in the same part of the brain as physical pain, the thing I felt one Sunday years ago I remember like yesterday, a clawing guttural discomfort, a rush to want to be with someone.
Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali Poet
When old biddies hold up the supermarket queue chatting to the teller, maybe they haven’t spoken to a soul all weekend. They were us once, we’ll be them too one day. Alf might have been posting his mail in the dog poo box for two years, but I bet back in the day ladies queued round the block to watch him do the twist.
We came from tribes, generations interacting together by the fire. The worst punishment was to send someone off alone into exile in the forest. Now we are atomised. For the first time the government has set up a ministry for loneliness. We swallow the delusion of company, with our screens and our laughing emojis, but we are alone in front of a pale blue light.
*
Just recently in BA I heard shouting down in the street, I went to the balcony to look down. A man was writhing on the ground in the light of the streetlamp while three police officers looked over him. I couldn’t handle his vulnerability and went down with some money rolled up in my hand. Up to you jefe, they said, at your own risk, he’s not cooperating.
I knelt down next to him, told him I hoped he was okay. In his writhing his baseball cap had come off. I’ll leave some money in your hat I said, reaching over to put it there. He rolled over and looked at me quite calmly. No quiero tu plata boludo, quiero que me dejen solo. I don’t want your money boludo, I want to be left alone.
*
The case for SOLITUDE
When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.
Timon, Lion King
My tío Carlos used to make himself a double whiskey the moment his whole family left the estancia, he’d go straight to the drinks cabinet and sit there overlooking the pampa, toasting his own solitude.
Don’t isolate yourself too much darling, my mother would beg me just before another solo bike trip. I’ll be fine mummy. I’d written in my diary, if I act well in the world, things will present themselves. But who was I kidding, was this just a pipe dream.
What if I’d found the one already.
I subscribed to the Asap Rocky line. You can’t go looking for love, he said, love has to find you. It’s like a gift. You just have to count your blessings, and stay humble. I loved that sentiment.
There were things one could only really access in the interior of one’s own company. In the important questions of life we are always alone, wrote Henry Amiel, our deepest inner thoughts cannot be understood by others. I often found company tiring, since unless I was in real connection with somebody I felt slightly raked over the coals. If not I had my corncakes and hummus, YouTube algorithms and bike rides, to sit by a stream and listen.
But one line of Bukowski’s pole-axed me.
Kinda the reason I sat down to write this in the first place.
I found it terrifying.
Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
Did this mean I was just blinding myself, from so many years of practice, to the idea that being alone wasn’t even good for me, and I was none the wiser. At the end of Into The Wild, starving in the Alaskan wilderness on the old school bus, Christoper McCandless comes to the hard conclusion his isolation is not the ticket.
‘Happiness only real when shared’
*
The case for ISS FRIDAY THEN
After all these years alone in the hole, I would thoroughly enjoy doing something, together.
Mole, The Wind In The Willows
When does loneliness sidle up behind solitude to tap it on the shoulder. My turn. When choice is removed perhaps. If we’re sat numbing out over some Russian road traffic accidents on YouTube when we’d do anything to be in the pub shooting breeze over some pulled pork, loneliness might rear its head.
Is not all human connection, the thing we seek the most.
The one person it seems we should try and get on with, seeing as they’ll be here hanging around for as long as we are, could be the interior of our brain. An ex-girlfriend had said to me rather exasperatedly once, Domingo if you can’t love yourself how will you love anyone. It was a truism but she was right. Many years later, I finally got there. The person looking back from the mirror was a top Gee.
I love you bro, I’d tell him most days, he’d blush back.
*
Out in Argentina, the spring shoots are one-upping each other. In the mornings the fireplaces dance before the thaw of midday. For three weeks I am with los padres. Two vanilla fights in twenty days is a record.
Sat in the comedor one evening we watch Shoplifters, a film about a family of thieves in Tokyo, three generations totally devoted to each other. It’s wonderful. Most of the time is spent all together in a zoo of activity sat on the floor of their apartment.
Is it always better to be with people, I ask across the table, even if you barney and don’t always get on.
My father replies in his baritone.
Obviamente.
It seemed a resounding conclusion. Just be with people. Life’s too short. But as Montaigne said, keep a room at the back of the shop for your principle solitude. With this stream of notifications and insta stories and the rest, we swallow the delusion of being together, while still alone, in a room, fixated by pixels. Not how we evolved, sat round the fire in furs sharing jokes talking over the size of our catch. Be together til they break your balls, then go hang out with some birdsong at dusk.
People strive for knowledge and I have none, yet the evening listens.
Keats
You can’t really be alone if you’re your own mate. At the end of the day it comes down to the man in the mirror. Cruise up like The Fonz, check yourself out and say I’m enough. I love you.
After all you’re not really alone are you.
There’s you, and the person looking back at you.
Two’s a crowd.
ISSS FRIDAY THEN.
