Lonely Walls

Are we really living?

CARINA DIERINGER

Humans aren’t meant to be alone. We aren’t meant to wall ourselves off from every living being, surround ourselves with only that which has no more life, and call it self care. Modern houses are an anomaly. A death sentence to the human soul.

My house is so lonely. Every time I sit on my family’s old secondhand couch, I feel as if I am slowly sinking into a world of TV static and the nausea of endlessly rotating microwaves. I know how to be alone, I remind myself. I know how to swing my legs going south on the 54, watching people walk by through the bus window. I know how to order Hmong sausage and buy orange dreamsicles from the food truck on Hoyt Avenue and read a book in the grass. I know how to smile at the blooming Vervain and Anise Hyssop, and call to the birds that sing to me. I know how to be alone in the traditional sense. Without the company of a person to watch the stars with, someone to make another track of footprints in the mud.

I cannot be alone in a house. I cannot be alone with buzzing lights and white walls and lifeless, inanimate objects. My heart begs for life. My heart begs for newly sprouted Yarrow, the Red-tailed Hawk that lives in the Black Walnut tree outside. The smell of rain and the changing leaves. The sky, the soil, the people that surround me. I bet yours does too.

So why do we spend the majority of our lives inside? Why do we put up fences to avoid talking to our neighbors, walls to keep out the bugs and rabbits, curtains to keep away the sunshine? When we lock the door and close ourselves off from the living world, we are not simply alone. We are suffocating.