We Are Always Alone
“You’re always alone. Because you can never really know another person,” I said to my to my roommate one night, during a conversation that can only occur between a former Literature major and a former Philosophy major. “Like really know know them,” I added for emphasis.
Jessie replied that I had a good point: two people rarely know all there is is to know about one another. But what about people who are childhood friends? She asked. What about people who have been married for, say, 60 years?
“But you can never know what someone is thinking at any given moment,” I insisted. “In that sense, we’re always alone. We experience most thoughts alone. How many things do we think about that we don’t say out loud? Those thoughts die with us.”
I wish I could say it had been raining during this conversation, but we were in the midst of a San Francisco Indian summer, the evening air almost rippling with humidity. It was a perfect night for people to spill out of their apartments in our Lower Haight neighborhood to read by flashlight in the park, and drink wine out of the bottle. Or to stay inside and talk about loneliness. To each her own.
I don’t look emo (really), but if anyone had sat through a blind reading of my literature papers back in college, they would have pegged me as the guy who always lurked in the back of senior seminar wearing a black beret, clove cigarettes just within reach. To really hit the dark n’ stormy motif home, all my lit pieces during the last year of school were written under the theme of “the human body as a coffin.” Because, you know. Why write about the joys of connecting with others — or how love can change a person — or the beauty that life has to offer at age 22 — when there was suddenly so much aloneness to explore? Solitude, I felt, was everywhere. No matter how much we said out loud, how often we documented, or wrote, or memorialized, ideas died with us. Big or small. There exists, even if for the scarcest moments, fleeting thoughts that someone you’ve shared a bed with for fifty years will never know about. This is a fact. Separation, in some form, is constant.
Autonomy is an interesting thing; what we share and what we forget, what we choose to say and what we keep private. This constant separation can materialize in the biggest of relationship landmines — withholding of secrets, lies, betrayal — and steering autonomy in this direction morphs an individual’s true identity to such an extent that it is, in fact, destined to die with him, and only him. We’ve all heard the line from that one Lifetime movie: “It’s like I never even knew him.”
Or this separation can occur through the less dramatic and more common omission of thought, a slipping through the cracks of sorts: thinking of an idea and forgetting it, dismissing a thought as unimportant, or simply choosing not to communicate something. No matter how these words are unsaid, they are still never borne to the world and associated with those who thought them; they pass by like blinking stars and die out in a mere second.
The concept of constant aloneness haunted me throughout college. After I cheerfully delivered a seminar reading about the idea of a human body as a coffin (dismaying a dozen or so parents of college seniors), I wrote a eulogy for all the words that were never spoken, tiny funerals for a million words a minute, all belonging to people who weren’t fully known by anyone — half-strangers. During the last few months of school I would lie awake at my boyfriend’s house while he was fast asleep, peering over at his peaceful face, looking up and down his still form under the blanket, his even-keel breathing. Who are you? I’d wonder, in half-horror, half-awe. Earlier that spring we’d formed a habit of wearing sunglasses at outdoor cafes and blatantly people watching, ruthless. One time I secretly did the same to him, performed surgery, pulling him apart and critiquing each piece separately: his nose, his chin, his eyebrows. You’re a nice man, I remember thinking distantly, but I don’t know you.
