Only the Lonely

To paraphrase the old saying, some are born lonely, others achieve loneliness, and some have loneliness thrust upon them.

When you are single, especially single and of a certain age, you spend a great deal of time by yourself. When you are single and of a certain age and live on your own, you have little choice but to be your own best friend--or worst enemy.

Last year I read a novel that passes for modern literature. It didn't pass my standards for a good read (which are actually quite low, as it happens) so whilst I did read it all, I can't recall the title or the characters' names or where it was set or most of what happened in it. What I do remember is that one character, possibly the heroine, was a single white female who resided in a doorman building in some Gotham-like city. And she observed more than once (this may have had something to with the tome's so-called theme) as she got in the elevator to reach her bachelorette pad after the usual 9 to 5 way to make a living, that the doorman's voice was the last she would be hearing until the morrow (when inevitably his would be the first she would hear in the morning.) It struck me as poignant at the time I read it, and has stuck with me though the rest of the plot hasn't. And I wonder if the notion of a relative stranger being the last person you interact with on a nightly basis is actually poignant, or just what we latter-day noncommittal career girls and boys inherited from our bra-burning foremothers and burned-out bacon-bringer-homer papas?

The concept is relatively simple to imagine. If you don't cohabitate with some significant other, it seems inevitable that most nights it will be someone not necessarily close to you whose dulcet voice will be the last you hear upon retiring. Even if you live at the Playboy Mansion with a bevy of buxom beauties just as blonde as you, or split the rent for a 2BR with some equally poor platonic pal, or are taking advantage of how "well" you get on with your parents by freeloading their basement apartment--unless you are suitably shacked up with some kind of lover, it will doubtless be the China King delivery boy or the hippie chick who sings for change on your corner who will serve as your final dose of human interaction whence the day is done. If you are lucky, it'll be a good friend who got you drunk then helped pour you into bed, or a nice crew of dog parents you encountered when out for the evening's final pee walk. But even luck runs out and if you live sans a partner in crime, you are likely to be lonesome tonight, and the next night, and the night after that.

Is that sad? I don't know, honestly. Sometimes it seems so to me. When I think of all the singletons in my vicinity, all of us feathered in our little nests night after night--making nutritionless meals for one, settling before the telly with a cold beer or with the papers and a cuppa, eventually climbing into bed and drifting off to dreamland--all within the sounds of silence. Even if you choose to live alone, even if you love your unfettered lifestyle, even if you'd rather be on your own for the right reasons than with someone for the wrong ones--there is something just......not, I think, how we are meant to unfurl this mortal coil. No man is an island sayeth the poet. And perhaps this endeth the lesson.