& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world…

– Ocean Vuong

Some Fridays ago, I’d decided to spend some time in the front balcony of my apartment to unwind. Moments like this are what I look forward to as the week trails to an end — to be away from the demands of work and the rigour of the lecture theatres, and the gratification that I can be a bit selfish with my time — to think or journal or take a walk, or do mundane things like stand in the balcony of the house and watch the world roll by.

But I enjoy this moment not because of the serendipity that often accompanies twilight, but because it helps unclutter my mind and earthing whatever pressure I might have accumulated in the course of the week.

But the week had not been particularly busy for me. I had worked on some projects and wrote a test, but in my desolation and the overthinking that often accompanies my aloneness, my mind had wandered around a fleeting sense of isolation, and I’d been keeled into that hollowness and an untamed sensation of which I couldn’t place or give a name.

* * *

I’m standing in the balcony and my are hands holding the railings. In the house opposite mine, a family is packing their belongings into a waiting truck, and a bunch of neighbours had gathered with them, some helping with the moving, some making small talks, while some glance away in liquid thought.

I thought of the apartment they were to leave behind, and in that moment, the hollowness in me intensified. I imagined its state of emptiness when the last piece of furniture had been moved, when the door closed, and the lock replaced, and how it would hold nothing but the memory and history of those who had been there, but only as echoes recalled through empty walls.

But in all of this, I still couldn’t pinpoint the reason for my own sadness, or the tightness in my belly, or why I am suddenly moved by the departure of strangers I barely knew.

* * *

I happened on the epiphany much later on, sitting in a pub, not dancing nor drinking, just looking in the direction of the dance floor, observing babel. And the answer had come in a form of song, but not the one playing on the stereo, but the one that had wafted into my room every other week before.

* * *

The school behind my house had changed location, and this particular week, silence had replaced the usual rhythm of their singsongs. Every morning, like a rite, I’d joined the students in their singing, not paying attention to the sequence, just miming along their choruses, existing in the moment. But how much had these voices mean to my aloneness, or how important this telepathic sharing have in helped attenuating my exaggerated isolation that the absence of it now had suddenly left me in a state of perpetual hollowness.

***

I think now of them — those kids, and grateful for their gift, the reassurance of company and lives that surrounds me in their songs, in the trails of their voices when they read comprehension passages aloud, how alive I have felt when they scream out arithmetics, the joy in their laughters when the closing bell rings and everything else quiet down.

* * *

In the pub, I engage with this thought and latch unto the memory of these people I barely knew. I think of how isolation could be an illusion — in our failure to watch out for what beckons to us in those liminal openings of our aloneness. How our engagement with solitude rest on the assurance of a kinship existence with the rest of the world — that a voice, a person would be there waiting outside when we leave our cocoon, when we feel assured to step out into the fold again.

* * *

I sit in the pub and engage with this thought. Or maybe it’s just a thought. The music is playing but I’m not dancing. I am not drinking neither. I blinked and seek closure where nothing had been opened, or why is my thought suddenly filled with flight and departure? Why did I wave off the girl dancing towards me? and why am I here alone, thinking of those who have departed in the twilight?