I could have easily titled this piece “For Myself.” While I’m writing today with a dear friend in mind, the only reason I’m writing in the first place is because I have found myself lost and lonely too many times to turn away from words, the one thing that invariably keeps me company. So when I write about the lost and the lonely, I inevitably write about myself. Here goes.
Stability can have an unsettlingly numbing affect. Sometimes the discomfort of a sweaty, over-capacity foreign taxi, in it’s absurdly inefficient, wildy un-American nature is all one needs to disrupt the loneliness of a sheltered life and make room for one to feel whole again. That's to say, perhaps it’s when everything around us is in order that we have the privilege to believe we are broken — and when we surround ourselves with the strange, the new, the less-than-perfect, we are able to recognize ourselves as whole... Or, rather, we are not afforded the luxury of preoccupying ourselves with our potential imperfections but rather must absorb and experience the chaotic disunity of our surroundings and as a matter of consequence, our own selves become whole in comparison.
In that way, to some extent positive discomfort can cure loneliness. But the problem of being lost still remains. It seems to me that the feeling of being lost is less situational and more inevitable; the more I learn the more I know I need to learn; the more I seek to learn the more I see; the more I see the more I internalize. The more I internalize not just the hand, sleeve, child in tow of the refugees begging for change at the traffic light, but also the folds of skin carefully creased at the corners of their eyes, like my mother’s; the slightly discolored right front-tooth, like my father’s. The way we resemble aspects of each other while existing so far apart. The way I put my hand to my heart and shake my head rhythmically, automatically, like my heartbeat.
But I do not exist in order to refuse; I just don’t know how, or when, or if I should help. And I find my thoughts, motives, feelings scattered on a plot between meaning and money whose r-value is increasingly distant from 1 in any form. I’m lost between graphs and graphite, struggling to find the line where privilege, a human right becomes privilege, an exponentially corrupting force.
Sometimes it’s much easier to consider the world a play, with a cast of figures not meant to change. Closing the curtains, my eyelids, changing scenes with a turn of my head. It certainly keeps sadness at bay. How to experience the world without losing yourself? How much perspective is too much perspective; how much sadness is too much sadness; am I made to be found at all, or rather to lose myself to the incurability of the truth?
In any case, it seems to be like the best cure for the lost and the lonely is removing privilege and living in the full sense of the word. The kind of vulnerability that one must embrace in order to travel and see and experience this world is, unfortunately, an open door for more lost-ness, more loneliness. But it is a different kind of loneliness, that which one encounters in a crowded, foreign street that that which comes from a silent suburban home. If you're lost, if you're lonely, grab a Macintosh rather than your Mac and take a taxi somewhere new.
