WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL TOGETHER?

You don’t notice when it first starts to settle in. I would call isolation a parasite, but it’s innate. And it doesn’t eat at you. It presses all of you outwards, emotions oozing from your ends until you’re made hollow. You’re floating along for a while and depravity along with you before it cloaks you and hardens. And then it all rushes back in, leaving you heavier than before, a bit lower in the ground. Each step feels like digging after that. And you get confused about why you can’t get back up to where you started, no matter how high you raise your knees and look to the sky. After a while, you stop walking. And you’re deprived. Deprived of love, falling to pieces, starved for interaction or intimacy. You fall into patterns not meant for you. And you die in your room, alone. You are I. I’ve died a few times, always alone and always in my room. I wondered how long it would take for someone to find my body or wonder where I had gone. I wondered if anyone would miss the sound of my stutter-laden, often unheard voice. I wondered if anyone would miss the scent of my pineapple shea butter wafting off my skin. I wondered what my legacy would be, who would say they loved me and what kind of things they’d say about me. Of course, I didn’t die. But those are the first three sequences of Isolation. Emptiness, confusion, and deprivation. The fourth step is the most important: recognition. The sequence becomes a cycle without it. I had to accept the solitude. I’ve learned that loneliness can be good to me. A moment to sit with my thoughts and undergo the process of getting to know myself. I recognize myself even more so in a crowd because I was able to familiarize myself with myself in a room all by my lonesome. 

 The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the room I died in is the smell. My isolation had been going on for a few years but it was magnified in an inescapable way when I moved to New York City to attend NYU’s MFA program on a full scholarship. I had never been around so many people in my life and I had never felt more alone. The first thing I noticed about NYC was how pungent the stench is. But my room didn’t stink. It smelled like cinnamon. I bought two cinnamon brooms and crammed them into different corners of my room. The smell washed the smell of NYC off of me everyday, the best part of my day. As my isolation became heavier, the happy smell of cinnamon morphed meanings for me. Isolation does that. It corrupts things you held close and shifts memories into something different entirely. It’s funny how the mind works like that, how it eats itself. 

Time passed and I stopped caring about myself. As far as the sequences of isolation are concerned, I definitely lingered in deprivation longer than the others. I went nearly three weeks without intentional contact with anyone. I found myself fiending for a hug. My dreams had even mobilized against my subconscious. As I slept, my mind was hammering the idea that no one cared about me into my head. I could feel the world’s apathy towards me, completely encircled by perfect strangers. Eventually I became apathetic to myself. I could see it in my clothes, my grooming, my eyes, my energy. I was off. I felt like a loser. On the outside, no one could see it. No one even knew me. I carried on my routine the best I knew how but nothing felt the same. I didn’t feel as handsome with a haircut, I didn’t feel as nourished by food, I didn’t feel as tall in my shoes, I didn’t feel as important to the world. In a room, dying alone, I had to open a door. I told a few people how I was feeling. And I cried. And finally, recognition was allowed to begin. 

 I realized that I never had a quality reference point for happiness, specifically I never had a quality reference point for my happiness. I have always felt shitty for being unhappy. I always thought I didn’t earn it and that I don’t deserve to own it. I cannot pinpoint a single time in my life when I can positively say I was happy and that I understood where the happiness was coming from. I have never known if I could be happy. The things I know that make me happy… music, film, art, creating, beauty… suddenly wasn’t enough to distract me. The happiness couldn’t have come from those things because maybe I would have been happy if I was never exposed to those elements. My happiness had to have come from me. I used to think happiness was a reward when in actuality, it is a recognition and acceptance of all conditions. Eventually I got sunset eyes. More nostalgic, sensitive, and sentimental. My mind played with my memories and washed them in lavender. A few more notes: My sadness comes from the same place as my happiness and they both deserve to stir inside of me and bubble when appropriate. Isolated people get a lot of manicures, I spent a lot of time staring at my hands. My emotions aren’t a mountain to cross but a river within me. My emotions won’t figure themselves out, no matter how much time passes. I’m human. Sex doesn’t make me feel less alone. When you’re alone cooking is therapeutic, when you’re isolated cooking is work. I am more anxious at times. My dreams interacted with my day a lot more than usual. Vanity replaced self-love. Life is the art of letting go, grace comes from how we process it. Expression is everything to me. When I was with just me and could not communicate love, I felt like a prisoner. I need to figure out the language of my heart.

The best thing about isolation is that you are not alone. The world is a community of isolated peoples. They’re all around you, living on top of each other trying to oscillate between desires, both unaware and unable to solve themselves. The isolated are an invisible majority. The unseen walk amongst us. The mind is a puzzle in solitude, fragments of self breaking away into jagged pieces. Isolated people are broken that way, multiplicitous. We need to be everyone for ourselves and that tension cracks you like a kintsugi vase. I found myself attempting to fill roles for myself that were previously filled by my mother, my lovers, my brothers, my friends and even the strangers I had become accustomed to. The more time I spent alone, the less I felt as though I owned my body. The isolated are everyone and still feel as though they are not enough. How unlucky. You can see your shadow cast against the wall, light breaking into every rupture but you can’t figure out how to pull it all back together.  

The most important thing I gathered from my isolation is that I need to be around some love. There’s nothing wrong with the desire for companionship but being alone can’t stop that. I need to love and be kinder to myself. I need love in my life, it doesn't matter who it comes from. I need a hug or an open ear or a flattering eye. Sometimes. It’s difficult to give all that to myself and I shouldn’t need to. I will never be everything I need but I can always be enough. Out of all my realizations, I had one question. What makes me feel together? A million answers race through my mind and they may all be valid. However, the most pertinent answer is simple: I feel most together when I can look in the mirror and see a friend of mine. A nigga just need to be around love sometimes. And I do that, when I am love. Even in isolation, I am love.