On loneliness

I've been living in the UK for a total of 17 days now, and I think it's fair to say that as much as I'm enjoying my time here, I'm a tad bit lonely. I don't want to overdo it, and I certainly don't want to sound dramatic. If I did want to sound dramatic, I'd say that realizing it's only been 17 days feels a little bit crushing, like stepping with your full weight on an empty aluminum can is a little bit crushing.

At the same time, I'm lucky to feel this lonely, because I realize that I haven't felt lonely in a very long time. For the last three years, I've (more or less) lived with my fiance, whose company I don't think I could have really appreciated until now. Absence, it turns out, does make the heart grow fonder.

Absence also encourages you to slip on your diet and eat tortellini three nights a week, to default to a pentalogy of sloppy t-shirts, to stay in on evenings when you should really be out there, soaking in the fresh night air and absorbing the culture like a six-dollar roll of paper towels.

Absence, contrary to what I imagined, isn't a cut-out of a person. It's not a human-shaped void on the opposite end of the couch. Absence is a miasma, a film that lightly coats the surface of everything in your day. It's a little less color in a photograph. It's slightly shittier resolution on your TV. Absence is subtle, but it's fucking pervasive.

Previously, I've characterized love as the realization that a certain person makes your life better than it would be without them. Love is that realization, and the work that goes into maintaining that relationship because - whether you're happy or sad or getting along  or fighting until you're blue in the face - your lives are more rich and full with that person in your life than without them. I've been fortunate enough these last few years to enjoy an abundance of love. Love from my partner, from my family, from some very special friends.

I still love these people, and they still love me. But we're at such a distance that for most of these past 17 days, we haven't actually been in each other's lives. It's like belonging to a cell phone plan but being just out of range of service. You find yourself checking constantly  for a signal and cozying up to weird corners of your apartment in the hope that something faint might come through. Sometimes it does, and the faces of the people you love most crackle through the screen and you hear their voice and their problems and its good to be together again, if only for a few minutes.

And sometimes nothing comes through, and it feels as if you are bobbing in the middle of a large, black ocean.