Coming To Terms With A Lonely Nature by Christian Brewster

My mother told me it was contagious, her proclivity for loneliness. When I was a boy, I couldn’t quite describe that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, that perpetual knot in my throat, that inexorable desire to be a nuisance to those who were sick of my company, that self-hatred knowing that people were, in fact, sick of my company. I was eighteen when she told me, shortly after my aunt passed away. She went to New York for a work trip, and I was left alone, left to my own devices. Just a year prior I would have been elated to hear such news. A whole week on my own, a week of TV and junk food and questionable decisions, but when she left early in the morning, without so much as a “goodbye,” I had never felt so alone.

The feeling was there before, but it was different now. It took a more violent, misshapen form, a form that I couldn’t pin down in a corner or hide in a closet or bury with false emotions and feigned smiles. It grew to a size that forced itself to rear out of every crevice. The first night my mother left I sobbed harder than when my aunt actually passed away. I suppose it was all catching up to me at that moment, but there was another more sinister realization that I came to that night. It was the realization that I would have to live with that feeling, that sequestration disposition, for the rest of my life.

My mother told me of its contagiousness like a doctor breaking some terrible, terminal, irreversible illness to a patient. She told me that she’d lived with it her entire life, that when she was nine years old, she felt the weight of it press down on her small, frail little shoulders, and though the weight eased some days, it never fully let up. That heaviness pushing her down was a sharpness in my gut. Its form was different but the effect was the same. She walked with a buckling of the knees and I walked with a slouch.

I didn’t see that loneliness in my mother until after I graduated from high school. She lost her sister and I lost the only person in the world who I felt I could be real with, the person I sometimes wished was my mother. Yes, I know it’s a horrible thought. Despite such a loss, despite hoping that we would grow together, become closer than we were, the exact opposite happened. Her loneliness tore her away from me, and so did mine. And so we were two people living in our apartment, struggling to say “hello” or “goodbye” or “I love you,” and when I found her on the floor, on her knees, sobbing the way I did when she left, telling me that she no longer wanted to be alive, I wondered when I too would no longer want to be alive, and if my existence got in the way of her desire to leave it all forever.

I had my dramatic moment of self-loathing shortly after, in college. I didn’t fall to the floor and let out pained sobs of contrition or repentance. It was quieter, which I thought was fitting considering that despite being surrounded by college roommates and people who claimed to care about each other (they didn’t), I remained mute on such matters. Quiet, but still dramatic. The climax of a movie or the prologue of a thriller, that’s how I chose to think about it, and when it was done and I was on my way out, the faces of everyone I ever loved, the faces of everyone I ever hated, the faces of everyone who loved and hated me, they all came flooding back. It was as if I had amnesia and an unexplainable miracle occurred, granting me my memory, granting me the ability to see those who would show up to my funeral and carry my casket like I did my aunt’s. In a way, this pervasive loneliness was an illness, though it has a different name.

Pills, therapy, long conversations, apologies, raised voices, hushed whispers, it was non-stop when I came back home from my mutilation. I figured the fast-paced nature of my recovery was on purpose, as to not allow me to try anything again. I guess it worked, though

most people didn’t know that despite the loneliness that remained, I had no interest in revisiting something that failed the first time.

So, as I write this, the solitude is still there. I tried to fight it, but in doing so I ended up hurting myself. There is no battling a state of being that planted its seed years ago. Doing so makes that seed grow into a malevolent, bellicose kind of tree, the kind that uproots unsuspecting plants and wildlife, the kind that stands confidently for generations while others wither away. I had to learn to live with it, to walk that fine line of romanticizing my sorrow and growing with it. When I really think about it, I thought that if I wasn’t happy every single day, I was just a profoundly miserable person, that there was no point in living such a life because who would? I thought of the complexities of the human condition in black and white, but I failed to see what was right in front of me the whole time.

My mother, just as sad as me, just as ill, brings me so much joy when I hear her voice on the phone, or see her sharp cheekbones from her profile, or feel the smallness of her frame when I hug her. How could I leave something like that behind? A shared loneliness is still loneliness, but its shape is much more controlled. I can bury it, put it in a closet, pin it in a corner, but there’s no need, not anymore, because its existence is inevitable. It has already made a home built on flimsy wood and rusted metal, but coexistence isn’t so difficult anymore. And so I wonder, even during my worst days, how sick can I really be if I still have her, the woman who chose to stay alive to see me grow? I think I know the answer.