The Lonely Stories by Natalie Eve Garrett

Author:Natalie Eve Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

When I worked as a tutor to students at European boarding schools, my job often necessitated long-term travel to the cities where my students lived. Traveling for work meant I spent a lot of time in train stations and airports. Sites of arrival and departure are also sites of relationship: couples parting and reuniting; families reassembling or splitting apart; one person breaking from or returning to the unit like a high school math problem about relational distance, the trajectories of two objects, mapped with dotted lines, always returning to each other. I moved through these scenes like a ghost, yet I felt astoundingly whole. I wasn’t alone because I had aimed at being with someone and missed—the way women are often portrayed—but because I had aimed squarely at being alone and hit the target.

I lived in Barcelona on my own for a handful of months. My apartment was up seven flights of stairs in an old, strange building, its lobby and staircase as huge and dilapidated as an abandoned opera hall, all flaking opulence and rubbed-off gold paint. My job meant I kept weird hours, and the city kept them with me. More than once I began to make friends, to find myself invited into a group of people. But I never pursued those friendships. Being alone felt like a project to which I had to commit all of myself.

I took long walks around the city, often leaving my phone in my apartment and getting lost on purpose. I eavesdropped strenuously on conversations in bars and coffee shops, piecing together the gaps within a language I was still learning, trying to tune my ear to pronouns and verb tenses. I listened to strangers flirting, their bodies moving in and out of each other’s space. I listened to drink orders and laughter spilling out of restaurants at the end of the night. I listened to everything but myself. I allowed myself to turn from participant to spectator. Like the hero in the stories I had read as a kid, I placed myself adjacent to but outside of society and began to understand its workings when I stopped trying to fit myself into it. I faded into the background; it was an enormous relief to not want anything from anyone, to not worry about whether I could persuade anyone to love me.

My apartment’s terrace was nestled among nearby buildings within a network of laundry lines and chimneys and picnic tables, struggling roof gardens and barbecues and outdoor parties, an open-faced warren of other people’s lives. I watched humanity swarm and choose itself again and again, the couplings and groupings that sutured people together. I stayed apart from it, aware that this time alone was a piece of wild luck, a limited offer. This much solitude was not sustainable, yet part of me wished it could be.

When that job ended and I went back home, I decided to prioritize living by myself. Living alone, especially in a city like New York, is a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.