On Being Alone

An exploration of loneliness through meaningful places in our readers’ lives

Written and Illustrated By Marley Richmond

I didn’t mean to follow a stranger’s recommendation on where to go to cry. But when I hiked up to their bench (as much theirs as anyone’s), the tears followed. It was, truly, a good place to cry; that little cove of nature provided so much that my bedroom did not. The orange leaves on the soggy ground muffled my heaving breaths. The empty sidewalks gave no occasion for self-consciousness. I saw no one else among the trees, but not for a moment did I feel alone. 

I’ve found that living with others can foster a sense of isolation without offering any real privacy, but being alone in nature works the opposite way. As my sniffles died away, I started to hear the sounds of those who shared the space with me. First it was the rustling. I noticed leaves rising and falling as if with breath. Then a bushy tail flew across a branch, pausing just long enough for me to see the squirrel with an acorn in his mouth. 

That squirrel reminded me of one who had frequented my grandmother’s house; my mom loved him and left peanuts out to encourage him to visit. We named him Kevin, and I spent the summer sitting with my grandma, watching him through the window and drawing pictures of him that ended up on her walls.

It had been a long time since I noticed the squirrels around me. But that afternoon, hours after I had learned that that day would be my grandmother’s last, I wondered if this wasn’t her squirrel popping in to check on me. He, I thought, knew something of struggle. Surely something of death. But despite the weight of the task ahead, he would keep stuffing his cheeks with acorns, would traverse the branches to his hordes, would work until he knew he could make it through the winter. 

I paused for one more moment, leaning against the trunk of a tree and imagining that the branches reaching above my head were holding me. I watched the squirrel make one more path through the sky. And then I resumed the weight of my own task ahead. 

When I asked our readers about the places they find meaningful, I was setting out to think about togetherness. I wondered what it meant to occupy space alongside other people, to have broken out of the walls and screens that have held the last twenty months of our lives. But the more places people told me about—and the more of those places I visited—the more I realized that the world is so often a lonely place. Our experience will always be rooted in our own bodies and minds, even if we share our surroundings with others. 

The thing is, we are hardly ever alone when we are out in the world—I would venture that we never are. The trees and plants and water and rocks (and, yes, squirrels) beside us hold a spirit. Some more obviously so than others, but they are all still present here beside us. Recognizing this spirit offers companionship even in the most solitary of moments.

And there is the fabric of place, too, embossed with all our experiences, stained with stress and worry, but equally so with happiness and love.

Nothing has offered me a glimpse into our overlapping histories quite like making a pilgrimage to places other people hold dear. I had walked by that bench in the Knoll hundreds of times, briefly passing through the stories of the people sitting on it. I had only wondered about the lives I dipped into in passing. But that is the bench in someone’s life. I’ve looked at the city outlined against the Washington Avenue Bridge before, yet I had never laid down my worry beside someone else’s, regarding each as temporary, as separate stresses and yet held together. That coffee shop was only ever a coffee shop to me—but it might not be anymore. I walked these paths every single day without considering what they meant to someone else. But think about all that meaning that we are wading through! 

Our world is heavy with the weight of history, even on a minute scale. That person’s bench—is it my bench now, too?—holds more stories than I could hope to learn. Sitting there, I was not alone. Even if there is no one present, we can find companionship in the imprints of those who have shared a space with us in the past. My grandmother’s squirrel may have been checking up on me that afternoon, but so might have the people who had cried on that bench before me. 

Places hold meaning. Noticing our surroundings and wondering about the history of the spaces we occupy might offer a tonic to the loneliness of life. I don’t think we have to know the experiences we walk alongside to find comfort in their presence. 

I forgot what it was like to see strangers and wonder about the entire life that brought them to this point, to the sidewalk we traverse in tandem. I’m glad to be back in the world. The babble of coffee shop chatter (especially the embarrassing delight of listening in on a first date), the awkward eye contact made between pedestrians crossing paths, and even the ache of a day spent carrying my life on my shoulders feel like a miracle now. I want to lean into this feeling, this space. To simply be. To stop worrying about being alone long enough to realize that I’m not. And I invite you to join me.