This hauntingly beautiful article by Olivia Laing for Aeon Magazine stopped me dead in my tracks last night, and has forced a re-evaluation of the fortnight I spent alone, and similarly withdrawn, in Brooklyn last summer:
I wasn’t supposed to be in New York, or not like this, anyway. I’d met someone in America and then lost them almost instantly, but the future we’d dreamed up together retained its magnetism, and so I moved alone to the city I’d expected to become my home. I had friends there, but none of the ordinary duties and habits that comprise a life. I’d severed all those small, sustaining cords, and, as such, it wasn’t surprising that I experienced a loneliness more paralysing than anything I’d encountered in more than a decade of living alone.
What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full.
Posted to life in 2013.