Help Let Me Let Me Out!

“Loneliness is good.” Her soft eyes reached across the table into mine. “I want my own children to experience it deeply before they think of being in a relationship. They must be able to value what comes to them from just having someone there.” I glanced awkwardly down into my coffee, swirling it helpfully in little circles. I made a joke and we moved on, but the thought stuck and began to germinate.

What is that hollow emptiness? It’s reminiscent of a dark room, where the curtains won’t open, the match won’t light, and the switch by the locked door flips up and down uselessly. It’s very quiet. The walls are completely bare and white, if you could even see them in the gloom. The cool temperature never changes, as if to mock the very stillness of every moment spent there: alone. Of course, there are moments you can forget you are there, like while you are imagining a close friendship that is not actually real in the truest sense. Or there are those moments where you pretend the bright memory of a roller coaster ride is enough. But you find life, again, fading to blackness. Sometimes there’s laughter just outside the door as people pass, talking to one another.  And occasionally, once in a long while, someone will rattle the door knob.

Yes, the door is locked from the inside. When the hurts of the past are kept to stand guard from a painful future, it’s another deadbolt installation. When you think about yourself selfishly constantly, you will stay by yourself mentally, indefinitely. When the failures of others are your problem permanently, you will stay there in the dark, ad infinitum.

What if one were to forget about the room entirely? The people outside it don’t know it is there. Being alone is all in the head, after all. What if the prisoner lifted the bars at the door, slipped back every painful bolt with forgiveness and selflessness? They would without doubt emerge into a bright world where the air smelled fresher and—where “no one ever noticed them.” Wait a second. If all the imaginary bolts are undone properly, there is no barrier between a human and meaningful interaction with others. When opened correctly, he is no longer alone; a person will forget himself, in turn giving to others altruistically. This happens when we place more value upon loving others, than upon the option of returning to the room.

Sometimes I can’t even see my own door from inside. I can’t see I’ve done it up nicely like Scrooge, only without the luck of having an old dead friend eerily breaking in to chirp, “Cowboy up, my miserable friend.” (Or something like that.) No one else can unlock this door.  I have to choose it, myself.

She was right. When it happens, my loneliness has always been good: especially as an indicator that my pool of water needs to drain some of that life-giving flow into other people’s lives because in its current locale, it’s turning into a stagnant swamp.  Besides, loneliness itself teaches us what “love” is, after all.