How to Be Alone

ALSO BY E. MITCHEL BROWN

danger generation

Iceberg Selves, A Short Fiction Anthology

Copyright © 2014 by E.M. Brown.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The author is alone just like you, but maybe moreso. Maybe more than anyone, who’s to say. No keeps track of these things.

Published in the United States of America. Armed services edition.

Contents

Cover

Also by the Author

Copyright

Step 1

Part II

PART III

To all those others but especially you, the curious crow.

How to Be Alone

Step 1

Don’t panic. If you’ve found this book and read this page, it may be too late for this. That’s okay. Loneliness and stress go hand in hand. One compounds the other. They move along in similar paths. If you have yet to panic, maybe you are not experiencing loneliness at all. Maybe no one just happens to be in the room with you.

Panic is a good sign. It’s an involuntary response as you’ve figured out, possibly multiple times. If you could stop doing it, or feeling it, you would have by now. I would have. So don’t let the alarm alarm you. This is how you dig further and further down into a narrowing hole, your shovel left mangled and warped. Sitting in a room alone, we are in a constant state of yearning. Sometimes there’s no sign of it. Sometimes it murmurs. And sometimes it screams through a megaphone against the ear. But it’s always there. So, what should you do if you do begin to feel panic? Breathing exercises have never worked for me. I try them with and without counting and remember to think something pleasant. Thinking pleasant thoughts... as if I knew what that meant. I’ll rack my brain for some memory, come up empty, and worry more that such a thought can’t be readily conjured. I look around and see no one. I hear no one. There are no echoes left. Where have they gone? What have I done? I try to move on, create something better. My breaths get sharp. Everything an exhale. I check the others rooms. The closets. The bath. My lungs strain. I check the drawers but there are no notes. The keys have vanished. My room becomes a hole. Losing oxygen. I can’t breathe. Dizzy and too dark to see. I simply close my eyes. And I try to look. I see something blue.

A sky. A breeze filled day in what my city brain imagines to be a meadow. There’s a great sprawl of long grass, a constant green all around. I think I’ve been here once or twice. I hear giggling and something fluttering in the distance. Behind a hill out there. I squint to see. I see kites. They emerge over the hill and swoosh their way higher through the air. The wind pushes them over the hill and rockets them above. The giggling turns to laughter as the children peek about the top of the hill, bobbing curled hair and ball caps, their bodies hidden. One sprints over the side, and a single kite dips drastically. The toys climb higher than anything reasonable, their tethers unusually long. The trees near me shiver lightly and send small green leaves to swim with the view. It’s a bright day. Not too bright. The clouds lazily drift above. I like that, their patience. They try their best to form into shapes. I can’t quite make them out. I look and squint and wipe my eyes to try to see them more clearly. I screw them up to see something there. I find myself sitting here, wondering about those shapes. What they’re trying to do up there. But in the end, they’re clouds. I like that about them. Those kites, their lines are so long and they get so high, they can almost reach them. I count the kites in twos. There must be almost fifty up there, diving with each corresponding blur of color that tumbles down the hill, slowly rising each in competition, trying to reach farther ahead. There’s so much wind to keep them all afloat. Enough for everyone. I breathe it in deeply. My lungs fill with clean air, cool to the nose. A good, headwind breeze helps it go down. A long exhale. The trees warm and stop their chattering. I take another with the wind. It reaches the deepest capillaries. The deepest crevices of my lungs. And I warm the trees a little more. I can breathe. I peek open my eyes. My bedroom is bigger than it was just a moment ago. My hands have calmed at some point and stopped shaking. I’m not alone anymore. I’m just in my bedroom. I’m here. That’s good. I’m alive. Panic reminds us we’re alive. It tells us we are overdue for some change. Living demands change. I’m just not really sure what to change at this point.

Step 2

Drugs! They work! No, really, they do. But only for a little while. And they also have the uncanny tendency to decrease the potential to shake free of loneliness with increased dosages. It’s just what I’ve found to be a matter of fact. You may be old enough to try this avenue. I pray you are if you are to try. With that said, of course they work. They alter your brain. They specifically augment your neurotransmitters. Dopamine, epinephrine, etc. You are literally changing the chemistry of your brain when you use them. Which is awesome! It’s likely one of the culprits in the way you’re feeling now is coming from above. Loneliness causes stress. It’s just a part of our nature. It’s funny how headaches are more frequent with increases in loneliness. They turn to body aches. They turn to heart aches. It’s an unnatural state finding yourself alone for any particularly long period of time. We’re simply not very equipped for it. Especially when the realization is something sudden, as a surprise. And so drugs relieve stress; it’s simple arithmetic at this point. I’ve gone this route, and I imagine many of you have as well. If you have, then you know and understand just how small scale this attempt truly is. Really. There are better, bigger strategies. The bottom line is simply that it works, but only while you’re using them. It’s just that no one has developed a drug to make you feel better without consequences and collateral damage. Otherwise, we’d all be taking it. Of course, we all know people who are currently doing drugs. Are they less lonely? How a drug can counter loneliness at large I don’t know. But it’s simply the case we will try. I remember the first time I’d ever tried drugs. We were at the beach. It was just the two of us. How odd we didn’t think to have sex out there. I guess, since it was my first time, maybe she thought it’d have overwhelmed me or something. Let me tell you, that was not a wrong idea. She brought it with her, and we sat out there together just at the edge of the surf. All the water in the world, and it couldn’t reach us. The night had creeped over our rendezvous away from the party without a word, and we laid back watching the stars come in and out. There’s something about every event in one’s life during high school. I don’t know what it is. A newness? You leave one world and enter a new one where nothing is done alone. Her face flashed bright with the flame and fell to a glow as she sucked in the smoke. She handed me the pipe. Thanks, I said, not yet knowing what to say. Thank you, she said, emphasizing the ‘you’. A boat or ship of some specific kind sat out there in the water. Waiting for something. A red and green light to be picked out among the stars that dipped below the horizon, not unlike a plane at night in the city. A lighter color smeared itself behind all those stars and, filled with fear thinking of anything to say, I pointed out to her that it was the Milky Way. A large wave crashed in and almost reached my foot. So, how many girls have you been out here with?, she asked. What? None. I mimicked her movements and barely lit the bowl. Here, she said. She grabbed the lighter and burned a small brush fire into the pipe. go, Go, GO.

It hit me immediately, I couldn’t believe it. I nearly dropped it into the sand before she caught it. She eyed me perplexed and second guessing. Her forehead wrinkled in just the right way that revealed a whole world inside to me. It’s why we started dating, that look. I don’t know, maybe I made it all up. I didn’t mind it. After a moment, the rush mellowed out and I didn’t mind a thing. She brought it back to her face and took another hit. Already? I can’t possibly do that again. I slowly reclined my way backward, away from her. The stars condensed into a fog up there. Something with eternal significance I couldn’t yet interpret. Her face strobed as the wind picked up, our lighter low on fuel. She met me down below. I grabbed for her hand. An attempt to stabilize in the loose sand, and she squeezed mine tighter than anyone had ever squeezed my hand before. God, she was beautiful. I leaned up, struggling against gravity to catch another glimpse of her face, telling her how stoned I was, causing that pretty wrinkle to appear once more. You okay? Yea, she said. Stop asking me that. What? Okay. I fell back down wondering what she meant.

I woke up, a wet shoe, not knowing if I’d told her everything or nothing at all. It could only have been one or the other.

Drugs are easy. They remind us of a time when something personal was shared. Maybe that’s why. But they’re also destructive. And as I have no intention of doing my body and more importantly my brain and demeanor and personality any long-term damage, alas we must find a new route. A greater attempt that preserves the self, cures our aches.

Step 3

Go Places. Go anywhere. Part of the reasoning for this is killing time. I’ll admit it. For some, this is a period carved out with effort. Sometimes all you’re up for is wasting time. Part of it is experiencing the world out there with your own perspective. Seeing things as you alone see them. This is hard for some of us. Especially those who tend to experience the world around them through the eyes of others. It’s a sign of great empathy and intellect to be able to do this. It’s also exhausting. Odd that the most empathic are the ones most drawn to being alone. Is it a break? A rest from all the worry we harbor for others? I tend to lean into the chairs of those I see movies near. I want to feel them feel a movie. But alone I sit straight. I think on my own terms. I predict plot points better. I cry without abandon. Whether in this group or not, being alone gives you time to reevaluate the things that have been evaluated only collectively for a long time. It allows you to recalibrate the senses in a trustworthy manner. Some people see clouds. Some see UFO’s. It’s good to go places alone. They’re different alone.

I can feel them flitter below my hand, like tiny trapped butterflies. Their weak, little muscles surprised and straining to get out. She grabbed at my first two fingers and peeled back the hand over her eyes freeing her vision. She turned, beginning a smile. Her hair had been as I’d remembered. Light and thin, it leapt and spun and fell down her temples waiting for me to pull them behind her ears. She let out a noise. Not a word or something translatable by passers-by but a sound, something guttural only I could interpret. And she dove into my shirt face first. Her arms followed, taking a circuitous route around my sides burying themselves below my own. This is how I remember that feeling. This is how I dream of it.

In her car, I played with the broken a/c vent, opening and closing it and pointing it outside the car. The weather was nice. It’s why we decided to go in the first place. The oaks on St. Charles kept us in the shade for the majority of the drive. Bright shades of sun splashed upon the windshield as we passed between trees, their canopies a porous tunnel the entire street. She lowered my window for me, matching the exact height of her own. She hated them being uneven. A weird tick, I’m not sure where it came from, or why it was so significant. She’d steal glimpses of me as she drove, her hair in a whirlwind, trying to keep her attention forward. I’d drink her in with all the time of the trip. A full street car nearly kept up with us, and would even pass us up in a couple spots as she maneuvered the pot holes and oak buckled concrete road inherent in the route. The zoo was always a fun place to go, but only ever in hindsight. With photos of llamas to laugh at and stories to tell of picnics or kids getting attacked by animals.

She was always hungry, as if she lived her life hungry. And so we headed in the direction of food first. There were families everywhere. Waiting in lines. Waiting around. Standing in groups of other families, holding their attention to the animals. We made our way through one herd but found another as we stopped off for a Roman Candy. She told me about the new restaurant she tried that week during her lunch break and the new one she wanted to try with me. Shrimp and oyster sauce piquant. Not the easiest dishes to find, even in New Orleans, and I told her how much fun I thought that’d be.

The elephants were always a highlight. There were two of them out on the bluff, entertaining the kids that crowded their side of the empty moat. We circled around focusing on the third. It just kind of sat there, not doing much. Enjoying the day. I slurped and chewed on my root beer taffy. He didn’t seem too interested in it, though. Or us. He looked around and swayed his trunk like a pendulum, lifting a leg every so often. She said she liked the elephants because of their ears. She wondered what they might hear like. Not how they smelled?, I asked. I figured everyone wondered how they smelled. What it might be like. I bet they can smell all kinds of interesting things, digging deeper and deeper into the earth. Because they’re so thin, she said, their ears. They’re more sensitive. And we talked for a little while about how they might listen to music. And if they’d prefer Radiohead.

We finally worked our way through the crowds of humans to the sandwich cart and picked out a thick vacant tree branch to eat on. I’m glad I brought the sunscreen, she said. I liked that. She wasn’t glad she brought her sunscreen or my sunscreen. But ‘the’ sunscreen. Something we both owned and shared. I don’t know.

We hurriedly walked through the snakes exhibit. A place always more fun and exciting and stressful in theory but once you’re there manages, in fact, to bore. They curled up into corners and slept and ignored all our whispers and occasional prohibited tapping.

Exiting the exhibit, we found ourselves with no real path to take. The zoo had been inundated with people. Packs of kids ran afoul and cut off all the available veins leading to the exit. She spoke without saying a word. Without moving her lips. She was tired and hungry and horny. Maybe it was the llamas. We clasped hands and pushed our way through the jutting elbows and shoulders and exhaled loudly and forcefully once we made it through. We put our hands on our knees, feigning exhaustion, and looked up to smile at one another. She grabbed my face and pulled it square with hers before kissing me right and good. That was fun, she said, and tugged at my shirt’s pocket. We should do that more often.

STEP 4

Take a hot bath. Especially when the weather is cold. The pores open up