I have spent much of this summer alone. 

Or maybe I haven’t. It’s hard to say. 

I haven’t been solitary, not in any sense of the word. It’s been three-ish weeks, and I’ve spent plenty of hours with my friends. I went camping, wandered for hours downtown, and shopped with the dwindling funds of the last allowance I would ever receive from my parents.  Those parts, the parts with company that is, are nice. But those moments are fleeting. The laughter, the gossiping, the people, slip through my fingers like sand until they’re gone, and I am alone once more. 

It’s terrible. Because it doesn’t matter how much I cherish the time I share with people if it doesn’t stick to me the way loneliness does. 

My loneliness is a foil to my moments with other people. It’s long-winded, lingering, clinging to me like a second skin. I do my best to ignore it. Mostly, I just try to leave my house. I am walking mostly, running sometimes, but long and frequent enough that I’ve developed new callouses on the balls of my feet. As I move, I flood my ears and mind with the same few podcasts, shuffling through and relistening to old episodes when I’ve finished the newer releases.

This, predictably, has become monotonous and boring. 

For some variation, I will occasionally go to the park to read. I try to find comfort in the company of R.F. Kuang, Casey McQuiston and Sally Rooney. Together we sit under a tree, music on, as I flip through their pages. I turn the noise-calling feature of my headphones to the max while I attempt to ignore the picnics around us, lest I forget that June, Alex and Frances aren’t really there.

A younger me would’ve glamorized this behaviour as mysterious or aloof. The slightly less young version of me has a little more trouble with that. In fact, I think younger me would question why this solitude pains me at all. To that version of myself, this life is ideal. 

I wonder what changed. I wonder when it changed. 

I want to go to then, to the moment of change, or maybe even before that. I need to know why this is the way I’ve become. 

Maybe I feel this way because I’m going to university and am preemptively homesick. Maybe it’s because I’m bored of listening to my inner thoughts. Either way, I want to regress. I want to return to before I was allowed to leave the house on my own. 

Take me back to when I was never alone, always accompanied by my parents’ safe hands and soft words. Bring me back to when going somewhere meant assured company and shared experiences. 

I don’t want to cook for one instead of six. I don’t want a quiet house. I don’t want to spend a whole day without seeing a person I love. 

I want to hear my dog bark when I knock on the door, for my mom to be there when I forget my key, and to hear my dad spew corporate jargon downstairs while I do my makeup in the morning. I want to listen to my sister tell my stepmother about her school life while I eat, to watch my lola do her low-impact morning workouts, and to fall asleep in my mom’s car. 

Because I love that life. I love the life I’ve lived, and I don’t know the life I’m going to live. Will it be like this summer solitude? I hope not. I pray not. 

And maybe, it actually won’t be. 

I guess I could be overreacting.

It’s just strange. I’ve been alone before, but I was never so affected that I felt the need to lament it for a couple hundred words. Maybe it’s something about this specific summer of my life—this transition phase between childhood and everything else—and I’m just scared of what other developments, changes or growing-ups I will experience before I have the chance to process it. 

When is the last time I shop at Brandy Melville? When do I turn auto-capitalization back on? When will I drink white wine without cringing at the taste? I don’t know. 

I suppose this is a rather bleak and overdramatic outlook on the rest of my life. I’m sure adulthood is not so bad. There are dinner parties, golfing and water cooler conversations, which are all fun (or so I’ve heard), so maybe it won’t be so bad.  

I guess I don’t know yet. Maybe I’m scared of that too.