Field Note 84: On Loneliness

The following is drawn from my journeys with The Traveling Librarian. The full account arrives soon.

by Traveling Librarian Tiogan

Loneliness is easier to carry when you can pretend it’s temporary.

It never truly leaves, but sometimes it’s easier to think of it like a journey with a known return—a road bending out sight, knowing that it eventually bends back towards home.

Throughout this life on the road, I’ve met many people who live this way. Fellow travelers, pilgrims, sailors who haven’t stepped on land for weeks or even months. Those who stay on the move not because they’re searching for something, but rather that stopping in any one place for too long reminds them they’re alone.

I hear them speak of “when I get back.” They talk of places where the streets are familiar, people who remember their names, ever hinting at a version of themselves that feels more solid, more certain, less provisional.

Until that day, the loneliness they carry is simply a condition. Temporary. Manageable. Almost noble in a way. I’ve learned that most of us out here on the road can endure a great deal so long as we believe it will end someday.

There is a particular flavor of melancholy that settles in when you realize the road doesn’t bend back towards home after all. It arrives gradually, the way dusk does in unfamiliar places, slowly enough that you don’t first notice when the light begins to change, only that the world has grown dimmer.

That inn you hoped to return to is shut down, the people you believed were waiting for you have gone on with their lives in ways that no longer include you, and the version of yourself you intended to reclaim has become a story you’ve told yourself rather than a place that feels like home.

The only thing that remains is loneliness. No longer a subtle itch, but an oppressive weight too intense to bear.

And so we return to the road.

We tell ourselves we’ll revisit those temporary homes we found while away, hoping to recover the version of ourselves we left behind. But the cycle continues. Our experiences continue to change us, leaving those once familiar haunts unrecognizable to the selves we have become.

We begin to build lives that do not rely on the promise of return. We learn the shapes of new silences. Come to enjoy our own company more than that of others. There is sweetness in small, passing connections that begins to feel like something whole rather than fragments of an incomplete life.

I don’t know that any of this makes loneliness lighter, but perhaps it makes it more honest?

An honesty, for all its barbed edges, is easier to carry than hope that runs through your hands like so many grains of sand lost to the deserts of time.

That’s all from Tiogan for now. Until next time, I’ll see you Among the Stacks.
- Mark