I’ve never been good at being alone. I’ve always needed somebody there, something to fill the void. Anything to keep me from myself. Many nights I sat up wishing for someone to come, to fix me, to sweep me off my feet and love me like I was their Earth, moon and stars. For a long time, nobody came. Still, I waited.
This went on for years, and though I couldn’t say exactly when, I’d say it probably started around the time I began middle school. I lost my elementary friends, lost my father and lost my childhood. Loneliness settled into my bedroom like an old friend. I didn’t know what to do with myself, and neither did anyone else. But Loneliness — always creaking up from the floorboards my mother had so carefully laid by hand in the attic where I slept — had her way with me.
As I got older, Loneliness and I became familiar with each other, and I became tearfully afraid of her looming silhouette. This maturing of our relationship was partially because of my abandonment of the particular dramatics that came with my life at age 12, and partially because the things I wanted but didn’t have became heavier, less superficial. I wanted to be seen and I wanted to feel cherished. I wanted my father to call more. I wanted to be saved.
I joined the cross-country team with a friend freshman year, and I stayed on the team for three seasons. I found the girls to be alien. They were perfect, fast, skinny and dressed in brand-name running shorts, and they were always a little bit mean. I ran and ran, never giving quite a full effort but still always trying to keep up, trying to make my way into the same world they inhabited. But I was chubby, slow and awkward. I never could make them like me, and maybe it was who I was or maybe it was the fear that if I truly tried to walk into their lion’s den, I’d be kicked right out.
It was almost better to save myself from that rejection, I thought, to stay quiet, run behind the pack and go home to Loneliness, knowing she’d be waiting for me when no one else was. I quit the team because I was sick of feeling so inadequate, not so much because my times were bad but because, still, after all that time, I felt like none of those girls liked me. I couldn’t seem to break my hand away from Loneliness’ grasp. I wore her like a coat, and she became inseparable from who I saw myself to be; before anything else, I was a lonely girl. I was not a runner. I was nothing.
I moved slowly into my last year of high school, became quieter and found friends who told me I’d find what or who I needed eventually. I believed them — but I wanted it now, not eventually. They didn’t seem to understand that in the waiting, Loneliness’ teeth had pierced my jugular, and I didn’t know when I would run out of gauze or the strength to hold it to my neck. To keep her at bay, I found a friend to drive around town with each night until early in the morning. He’d gently drop me off, let me linger in his car before I’d walk slowly up the driveway, listening to the quiet of my street and watching his headlights reflect off the dewy concrete. He pulled away as I stepped through the threshold and each time, the terrifying click of the door latch melting me down, my face crumpling and warm tears tracing my cheeks. No matter how hard I tried to hide from her, there she was at the end of every night, waiting.
When I moved to Ann Arbor, Loneliness came with me, though I thought maybe she wouldn’t. I believe, however, that I am the one who packed her into one of my boxes, wrapped her carefully in bubble wrap and pulled her out when the newness became too overwhelming and I wanted a fear that felt like home. In my first semester, she grew too big for my dorm room, pushing me out during the winter term so I would find people to fill my nights. But even once I found people I loved, I lingered in study rooms until every one of them had gone to bed and walked home wondering why I still hadn’t been saved. Eventually, as the year ended, someone came and told me he would. And he did.
Literally and figuratively, he was a runner. He was fast. He ran to me and pulled me with him before I knew where we were going, and I spent my sophomore year trying to keep up. I pinned a bib that read “boyfriend” to his chest, and he ran me in so many circles that eventually I got too twisted, cut strings I shouldn’t have cut, strained others to the thinness of a single thread. He took up my life in his arms and I lost people, or almost lost them. He loved me in a way that suffocated not just Loneliness, but me, too — and I let him, because the price of locking her out was never too high for me. I didn’t feel good, but at least I felt better. Eventually, though, he ran away, and it shocked me. I guess I had fallen too far behind him to notice where he was going.
When Loneliness came flooding back to me in his absence, I drank her in like glacier water. She was shining and new all over, washed clean by my realization that love couldn’t save me in the way I had hoped. I spent nearly the entire summer on my own, back home in my attic, leaving work every day excited to spend time with myself. I took creaky dancing steps to the radio while I got ready in the mornings and filled my evenings with singing, cooking, learning guitar, painting, writing and baking. It wasn’t all so peachy; there were certainly times I wished someone would come sit with me in the middle of the night, and I spent August counting down the days until I was back at school. But still, it was a different kind of summer. For the first time in years, I didn’t cry when my door latched behind me.
As I came into my junior year of college this fall, there have been many issues having to do with love, friends, family and workload. I’ve already experienced many shortcomings, and I’m sure there will be many more. But I have been running. It’s been much more different from when I ran before; in high school, it constantly felt like a fight to become something that I wasn’t, trying and failing to fit into the team. But now, I’m finding it to be peaceful. I like having time to myself. I like seeing my pace get faster and my mileage getting longer. I like running with Loneliness rather than away from her.
This past Sunday, in the pouring rain, I set off for the Nichols Arboretum. My goal was to get lost. I took no music, no phone, nothing but my simple running watch, my house key and me. As I jumped over roots, listened to my sneakers pound the gravel and felt the cool rain land in bursting droplets on my skin, I was surprised to find myself laughing. Alone in the woods, I laughed and laughed. In that moment, Loneliness held my hand, led me along the river’s edge and down paths of glowing green trees. She filled my legs with strength and my heart with blood, pumping and mine for the taking. Alone in the woods, I laughed. My savior had come, and it was me.
Daily Arts Writer Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu.
