Tact

It's an annoying, tugging feeling, this loneliness. You sit on one of those stone benches in a park for comfort but you don't feel comfortable anyway because the weatherman predicted the weather wrong again last night. Suddenly and all too impertinently, a current of cold air descends to wrap itself around you like you needed it. You don't. You chose this.


Sometimes it's not bad. You can only feel loneliness when you are among a throng of people who know each other. You would want to get to know them at some point, then toss the idea away like an ink-stained page hastily torn from your calculus notebook because they look at you like you are missing an eye (or eyebrows, perhaps) -- the hero of a tragedy, a freak; not a freak, maybe, but a lonely person, which is true. The point of comparison exists, staring you down with hostile condescension: you, alone on that stone bench, and them, linking arms and walking in small, synchronized steps. If there weren't so many people, you probably wouldn't feel so alone.

So you fiddle with whatever communication device you have and make yourself look busy. Maybe you can take out your phone and pretend to type a message (when, in actual fact, you are writing about this sad, sad experience) or call someone and create a monologue with all the spontaneity you have hiding in the recesses of your frontal lobe. Try to read a book. Sartre is an entertaining narrator.

There is more to loneliness than its apparent denotation, if you know how to use it. You can think when you are alone. Think about little things that might not be as mundane as they appear. For instance, that lamppost three yards away from you is emanating visible light waves of about six hundred and thirty nanometers, something you learned in high school physics, and you wonder how long it must have been there, standing, just standing, letting everything in its scope be seen and not itself. It must be lonely too, if it were a person, because the other lampposts are about five yards away and aren't giving off any light, like they grew tired of working and gave up, leaving that lamppost the burden of their duty.

You can't really move because you have nowhere else to go. At least, not in the void of this night. Pretend you're a sculpture people walk by and never spare a second to look at. Maybe ten years ago your creator was a celebrated artist. You were his ultimate work, his magnum opus. The curator of the museum decided that you needed more exposure and handed you to the makers of the park. To purgatory with that man! They settled you on a podium and let pigeons take a dump on your meticulously modeled head. You were a marvel once, but now people barely acknowledge the weight of your existence. Maybe, if we chip off a bit of your nose . . .