Dispatch from Mars

On being both alone and not alone.

Hey Kate, the email subject line read. No one really calls me Kate anymore, unless I ask them to. It was from Jennifer, my best friend in middle school and old neighbor. We hadn’t talked in nearly a decade. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t on any social media; I had tried a few times in vain to search for her. Annual Christmas cards from her parents disclosed news about Jennifer like it was the weather, matter of fact and unremarkable: she got married, she studied nuclear engineering, she no longer lived in Massachusetts. 

"I know this is totally random, but I've been thinking about you and wanted to see how you're doing. It took me awhile but I left that stupid cultish church I grew up in.”

Her family had been involved in a church with no name or denomination which was perplexing to my Episcopalian-raised, Catholic school-going self. She couldn’t always hang out, because she had church commitments multiple times a week. When she did come over to my house, she’d tell her parents we were studying. 

She was an only child and often was baffled by things my parents permitted me to do like watch Flavor of Love on VH1 or let me skip church. I was a youngest child and accustomed to leniency. Both of my parents worked. My afternoons consisted of stretches of unsupervised time where I would make myself grilled cheese sandwiches, deliberate my MySpace Top Eight, and wander around the nearby strip mall to see what I could afford with the clump of dollar bills I had scraped together, sometimes a Jamba Juice Strawberry Fields smoothie, other times YA novels set in dystopian futures, populated by heroines recruited into underground resistances.  

Jennifer and I were smart girls, sharing an allegiance to our own brilliance. We wanted to be accomplished and independent. We insisted we were going places. I think we both were also prone to loneliness. Though I wasn’t an only child, my sisters were at least a decade older than me and lived in another state. To aspire to independence felt like vanquishing loneliness, transforming it into something hard-won and admirable. 

As we grew out of our gangly puberty, Jennifer started wearing longer and longer skirts as if her knees had suddenly become scandalous. Her parents withdrew her from the public high school and enrolled her in a small Christian school associated with her church. We no longer had the excuse of studying together. Our conversations petered out and eventually we lost touch. 

"The analogy the church would use is that we are on the table and the rest of the world is on the floor," Jennifer said. We had volleyed emails back and forth and now were finally calling each other. "It's really hard to pull someone up onto the table, but it's very easy for someone to pull you down onto the floor. I was warned that if you and I spent too much time together, you'd pull me down onto the floor, but I wouldn't succeed in pulling you up onto the table." 

As she told me this, I was actually lying on the floor, on top of a yoga mat, trying to correct my Quasimodo posture from a day spent hunched over my laptop. I glanced over at my dining room table. The floor seemed like a good place to be. 

Jennifer said the hardest part about leaving the church was losing everyone she knew. She had always been an introvert, but sibling-less and estranged from the life that came before, she now felt even more alone. In fact, she was now living by herself in Los Alamos, a town of about 10,000 people, in New Mexico. The social isolation of the pandemic did not feel like a meaningful departure from her life before, she confessed. 

I also felt alone; I feel alone. 

The first week of the lockdown, scrolling through Instagram, I saw a cartoon from Liana Finck and audibly gasped. I printed it out and taped it in my journal. “So here I am, alone,” I wrote,  “Exactly as I always feared.” The next day, my melodrama embarrassed me, so I scratched it out, leaving only the cartoon. 

Being alone has always been my biggest fear. It’s also the condition under which I’ve made my life. I live alone and work alone, mostly. That’s been true for almost four years.

Six months ago, I moved to New Orleans by myself with a U-Haul full of books and no plan. I had just finished traveling for six months after quitting a town I loved in a fit of independence. I had wanted to remember a bravery I used to inhabit in my early twenties when I would throw myself into exciting situations.

For instance, right after college, I moved to Lagos. I knew no one and had no day-to-day work beyond the projects I manufactured for myself. I felt like I might as well have been living on Mars. Even when I could talk to people elsewhere, it felt disjointed: I was wasting away in the afternoon heat, they were just waking up to a chilly morning. I was getting ready to go to bed, they were still at work.

So, I spent my first weeks there talking to myself. Every day, I’d craft some narrative of daring adventure and exciting independence: Today, I will explore the grocery store and examine the mysterious, foreign snacks like artifacts in a museum. Tomorrow, I will attempt public transportation and ask for directions from a stranger. Absent the forward momentum that had defined my life up until that point, I wove and unwove my days, making and unmaking a story for myself about who I was and what exactly I was trying to do. 

I took pride in moving somewhere by myself. It made me feel accomplished and independent just like middle school me wanted. But the independence didn’t feel like some conquering of loneliness like I hoped it would. Instead it involved hours and days oscillating between conversations with myself and the familiar roar of social media which risked compounding my loneliness as much as abating it. 

Now, in social isolation, I feel an eerie deja vu: I'm working familiar muscles from those first months in Lagos. I make lists of tasks, of foods I’ve eaten and foods I plan to eat, of people I ought to call, of schools I should maybe possibly apply to, of home project to tackle, of all the things I will do during isolation, of all the things I will do once it is over. I also create arbitrary dares for myself: to catch the cockroach near the trash can without squeamish hesitation, to build some shelves and fill an empty wall in my kitchen, to not ask for help, to just do it myself. At night, I unravel the day, spooling it into thread for the next.

As the days and weeks go by in lockdown, I feel less like a human and more like a tangle of algorithms shot through cyberspace. My pupils are going square from staring at illuminated rectangles all day. Statuses and tweets and stories sound like trees falling in a forest of falling trees.

I miss hugging people and being hugged. I miss eye contact. I long to cook meals and have meals cooked for me. I want someone else to offer to do the dishes. It's exhausting to be the sole caregiver of myself.

I text my uncle who lives by himself in Casper, Wyoming. I ask how he is. "Bored, boring, nothingness...except for the 8pm howling." He tells me that across the state, people go outside to howl everyday at 8pm. He’s a recovered addict turned social worker who now teaches addiction studies at the community college. His students ask him for a howling break in the middle of (virtual) class and he obliges. 

I ask him if he howls too. 

"I don't howl," he says.  "I stand outside and yell, 'I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!'" 

Maybe it would do me good if I stood outside and yelled that at 8pm, I reply.  

A few years ago, we gathered on the grass of my uncle’s backyard to watch a total solar eclipse. It looked like a slow motion blink as crescents of light waned into total umbrage. The dogs in the neighborhood went crazy. So much howling. My uncle kept joking that maybe it was the end of the world.  

The morning after, I was tasked to go pick up donuts for the whole family: cream-filled, glazed, chocolate-frosted, a few cake with sprinkles, and some French twists, too. At the shop, an old man leaned over his styrofoam coffee cup and asked in a hoarse whisper, “Was it me or was that whole eclipse thing kind of scary?” It was, I assured him. It was definitely scary. 

I wonder how that old man is doing right now. 

I call my mentor one afternoon. His wife died a few months ago and I’m worried about him. I also want him to tell me what to do with my life. We mostly trade opinions about what we’re watching on Netflix: we agree that Unorthodox is affecting and Tiger King is morally dubious. He doesn’t tell me what to do with my life.

“When it comes to fight or flight, I’ve always been partial to flight,” he jokes.

I want to fight, I say. But I don’t really know what fighting looks like right now. I donate. I read the necessary journalism and insist on “facts.” I put my name on all the listserves. I join the Zoom call panels about the state of the world, but get distracted by my pasty face staring back at me. I shelter in place. I wear a mask in public. I keep my distance. I don’t really like doing any of it and feel none the better for the fight. 

In my neighborhood, just a few miles up from the French Quarter, I live near a bayou and public park and community college. It is a neighborhood of porches, like much of the city. My porch has become the threshold between my isolated interior and the social world outside. 

I begin my day by opening all of my windows and my front door, too. I drink my coffee while sitting on my front steps. I listen to the gaggle of birds who converse in the trees. I wave at the dogs and their owners who walk by. I begrudgingly pet the neighborhood cat, Mia, who has figured out how to open my screen door and make herself at home on my couch.

When it’s not unbearably hot, I force my body out into the world for a walk or a run, so I can remind myself that a world outside my apartment and my laptop exists, that other people exist. 

Neighbors sit and smoke and banter and play music and call out from their porches. On any given evening, I can stop by four or five porches, greeted by people unknown to me B.P. (Before Pandemic), now my intimate interlocutors in this shared experience. I feel like Cyrano de Bergerac conversing from the distance of the sidewalk. Perhaps I’ll start greeting them in verse. We share advice and (sanitized) provisions, like rolls of toilet paper, canned beans, hammers to help me build my shelves. We confess that we feel stir crazy. We bum cigarettes even though we know it's dangerous. Striking a lighter may be the most intimate contact of my day. I feel less alone. 

One consequence of this pandemic? Deep, abiding love for my neighbors, I think, while walking around my neighborhood one night, beer in hand. I’m tipsy. I don’t feel embarrassed about having corny thoughts like that when I’m tipsy. 

I used to believe the secret of love was compatibility. You meet a hell of a lot of people in your life and from there you winnow down to the ones who match you best: they read the same books and like the same music and frequent the same restaurants and make the same passing jokes about the events of the day. Now, I think the secret of love is loving the people in front of you: the ornery sibling, the overly nervous neighbor, or the cat who barges through the door. It feels so silly to expect or wait for compatibility. But maybe I’m just impatient. 

I've been listening to a lot of Pete Seeger to pass the time: "This Land Is Your Land," "Living in the Country," and "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)." I enjoy the live versions best, because they evidence that Pete Seeger is not a musician of individual genius, but a voice from the collective struggle and tradition of common people. 

"We Shall Overcome" is my favorite song of the eponymous album of Seeger's. Recorded live at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1963, his rendition begins with him saying:

"If you would like to get out of a pessimistic mood yourself, I've got one sure remedy for you: Go help those people down in Birmingham, Mississippi, Alabama… All kinds of jobs that need to be done. It takes hands and hearts and heads to do it. Human beings to do it. Then we will see this song be true."

The assembled crowd begins singing each refrain with him. Not a cacophony, but a chorus. Like a hymnal, it's repetitive, an incantation that summons something seemingly holy: We are not afraid, we are not afraid, we are not afraid today.

I always sing along with the record.

To insist against the inevitability of our aloneness is the animating force of movements. This is something Pete Seeger seemed to understand: there is no difference between the stage and the audience when it comes to making music, no difference between being on the table or on the floor when it comes to salvation. We are all we have. 

So, what is to fight? Maybe it is to witness, to care, to say things don't have to keep on being the way they are. We don't have to keep feeling alone. In fact, we are not alone. 

I pick up the phone. I call Jennifer. Hey Kate, she answers. It’s so nice to hear from you.