Things I started to notice when I was lonely.

One.

The senior woman sitting at the library’s chunky desktop computer beside me, meandering from one Instagram profile to another, following comments and replies like a Russian doll eternally collapsing unto itself.

Two.

The man at house number 2615 just around the block from ours, slamming the front door on his dog, the one always leashed and alone on the porch. “Shut up! Stay out!” He yelled as she barked for attention.

Three.

The Asian auntie having a slice of pizza, and then the pimply young teen sat next to her on a bar stool, each staring out the window, nearly touching, yet as disconnected as could be as they ate their respective slices silently.

It wasn’t just me. It was like the whole world was suddenly lonely too.

Everywhere I looked I noticed others that had been passed over, seemingly discarded, relegated to the not-so-important-pile. Each of us still carried about our days, sure. But there was no urgency, no purpose to our actions. Instead, it was as if each of us were trying to prolong every moment into yet another. At least, that’s what it was for me when one lap around the block became two, until suddenly I had somehow walked over to the library, past house number 2615 and the Asian auntie.

“I’m so sorry to do this to you, but this computer is actually reserved,” a man, leaning down towards me, said as he pointed to the computer.

Of course, now I saw it, the big notice at the top of the screen flashing reserved. It explained why I hadn’t been able to log in, unsuccessfully trying a variety of different passwords in turn for the past few minutes as I side-spied the woman next to me browsing Instagram.

I gave up my seat — his seat. And left. Not to be dour, but it did feel like at that moment even the local library didn’t have use for me.

“Narrative becomes paradigm,” Christoper Ryan once wrote.

I thought of this as I looked up at the sky. Sunny. Piercing blue. It made me doubt how much of this feeling of utter loneliness was actually something created in my mind versus a reality just as verifiable as any. Like, say dog shit streaking a sidewalk. Put simply, there are some things you cannot unwish or unsee or unfeel.

Perhaps it is true, that some of us aren’t always needed. That there are enough bodies doing the necessary things, which leaves the rest of us to wait for pickings to come our way: like, for when a friend needs help, or a family member gets ill, or a stranger drops their sweater on the street, or a job comes around that actually pays.

Lulls.

That’s what Kyo Maclear calls them in her reflections on life as a writer. How the unbusyness of it sometimes can be both peaceful and yet so utterly terrifying. Terrifying because there is something about inactivity that rattles us to the core.

“I have come to realize that a lull is not just an occupational problem. It is an emotional, intellectual, and existential one as well,” she concludes.

Maclear is not far off the mark. Recently, I read a study in which psychologists measured levels of damage that our spirits could handle. Turns out, unemployment was worse for our emotional well-being than getting a divorce or even cancer.

It is grim, I thought as I walked, now to the grocers as if my feet were on autopilot. Of course, they were. That’s how it works: even when you have two feet and all the time in the world you end up doing the same thing, walking the same streets, never really straying from your bounds, almost as if there were an invisible fence keeping you inside yourself. If I were to map for you my own fence, you’d notice how it has a very specific radius around my house, extending and contracting quite curiously along this or that street. But it is not curious to me at least. Because each line has been drawn for a reason. For instance, there’s a big renovation job that keeps me glued to the left-hand side of Trafalgar St., as if I were in charge of monitoring progress on the house’s development. Though of course, I’m not. It’s just another way I artificially imbue meaning into direction.

The great irony of time is not lost on me. That when you have it, you become a desperate creature, lulled into an anxious state, hyper-glued to invisible forces of motion.

I envy cats. The way they chill and find rest almost anywhere at any time of day. I recently walked over a cat as I was descending a set of stairs. The cat didn’t even flinch. That’s enviable. I’ve always struggled with naps. The concept of them even. The comfort of my own bed at home does have a certain appeal, especially mid-afternoon the way sunlight streams in through the slatted blinds. Sometimes, if I walk past my bedroom while going from the office upstairs to the kitchen below I think, quite momentarily, how nice it would be to cuddle into the sheets. But this is just a thought, and sure enough, it passes as soon as it’s come. Truth is, I’ve always associated naps with the elderly or lazy and I can’t even nap in secret, like when no one is home or after me for a deadline. That’s the power of this invisible fence, you see.

There’s another irony about time too though. That when it’s filled, as in busy, it’s often largely just bullshit masquerading as purpose. I know this all too well of my own work. But it is a particular disease of our culture more generally. Toing and froing. It reminds me of something Eduardo Galeano once wrote, of which I’ll have to take dramatically out of context because his message was about utopia and mine is about anxiousness:

“So what’s the point…?” He wrote. “The point is this: to keep walking.”

Which I do. Just one more block further East so I can walk off a nagging thought that Galeano’s quest for utopia makes me think of: That when chasing dreams, we may forget to breathe sometimes.

I’m trying to remind myself to breathe. To relish pauses. To try another street. Or as Maclear writes more poetically, “to feel the silence and immensity of the universe without being too rattled by it.”

I hear that. But fuck, how terrifying it is to feel unwanted, unneeded, to be in a lull and alone when the universe is silent and all you’re looking for are signs.