Crowded Solitude

The alarm goes off. I’ve hidden it behind the books in the shelf to force myself to get up and search for it, which should wake me up and start the day. But it never works. So I try to cover my ears with my sheets and pillows until my older brother gets up, annoyed, and puts my alarm right in front of my face, going right back to bed after the noise is over.

I turn to the other side, getting more confortable, falling asleep again, only to wake up half an hour later, with my mom ripping my sheets of my hands.

“Wake up, Robin! You”re gonna be late for school again!” she loudly informs me.

“Robin! Robin!” My younger twin brothers jump on my belly, waking me up completely.

“Shit!” I yell.

“Louise! Adam! You’re late too! Get out of here, you gremlins! Shoo!” Mom orders them, and they leave giggling. And then to me: “Get your lazy butt out.”

I get up and get ready to school with no rush despite everything. I leave the apartment with the twins and my brother, who is taking them on his way to college. Every neighbour we cross with greet me joyfully and full of energy. Once I’m out of the building, the sounds of cars moving back and forth and honking in the road sound louder. Tobin and the twins say goodbye and go down the sidewalk. I go up, putting my earbuds on and holding on to my backpack straps.

The morning has come.

..........

“Hey, are you listening, Robin Hood?” Elisabeth waves her hand in front of my face.

“Huh?”

“I said I’m going to the bookshop tomorrow afternoon check on some new books. Wanna come?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah! Sure! Sounds fun, Elisabeth Bennet.” I respond.

Our real names aren’t really Robin Hood and Elisabeth Bennet. It’s a long story, but now we call each other names of fictional characters from books.

“Good. We all know how much you love reading, so I figured I should invite you.”

“Yeah, I go there sometimes too, in the weekends.”

She tilts her head to see my face. My gaze is fixed on the floor.

“Is everything alright, girl?”

“What? No no, yes. I”m fine. I’m... just thinking. That’s all.”

“Okay, but if you need to vent, you know you got the Book Club” she says, talking about our friends and her.

“I know don’t worry. Everything is a-okay.” I smile. And yes, everything was okay. I was just having a no-day. A overthinking day. A day to be melancholic about the past and afraid of the future. A lonely day. That”s all.

We lift our boards once we have all we want to eat and then sit at the same table we always sit: with Oliver Twist and Tom Sawyer.

“Hey! So how was the movie last night?” asks Bennet.

“Oh, it was awesome!” Said Sawyer. “It portrayed Freddie Mercury’s life almost accurately! Oh and the soundtrack! I felt it inside my body!”

Twist chef’s kisses. “Marvellous.”

“NO SPOILERS!”

“Lizzie, it’s a biography of the Queen. Do you really need a spoiler alert?”

The three laugh.

“Hey, I just told Hood over here and we agreed to go your uncle’s bookshop again, Oliver. You guys wanna come too? That way we could celebrate our last moments together before we head to college. What do you say?”

“Depends. Are you gonna bother the other clients and be loud like last time? Because I don’t want to get grounded again.”

“No, Twist. I never had the intention to harm you that day. I promise I’ll behave.”

“In that case, count me in!”

“Me too!” Sawyer bit his sandwish, so his “me too” makes him spit billions of sandwish pieces in the table.

“Eww, gross!” Bennet laughs out loud.

I eat in silence, while their mini food fights and the vivid conversations became white noise to my ears.

My eyes run through everybody eating lunch in the open space of the canteen. Everything is just so loud: the laughs, the talks, the cutlery hitting the plates. We are three days away from school to be over. Everyone seems so happy. But me... not so much.

Maybe it’s my fault. When I’d watch young adult movies, I try to simulate the fresh feeling of excitement in the first day of school every year, because of all the opportunities I had to show myself to the world and meet people like me and, who knows, maybe find love. But that never happens, and maybe it’s because I’m always too afraid to make it happen. And then in the end of the schoolyear, that feeling of freedom that comes with vacation? Never had it. The first fiver years were just relief because I got rid of my bullies for at least three months, and the next ones, I always felt like the last days of school were just another Tuesday. And that always messes me up because I feel like I”m supposed to feel happy, but I don’t.

One other thing? I’m three days away from ending school for good and I never fell in love. I see Maya and Dan making out and giggling under a tree. They must be so happy. And I never got to experience young love like that and for that I feel like I’ve missed on a huge opportunity.

Because of that, I can’t help but drop a single tear in my hand, without anyone noticing. Because most of the time no one notices.

.........

“Hi, honey! Wanna grab a bite? I made cake!” says my mom as soon as she hears me close the door behind me and drop the keys in the table.

“Hi, mom. Maybe later. I’ll be right back.” I say, opening the door to my room and dropping my backpack.

Despite being summer, it started raining soon after I entered the building. I love rain. I go to my window and open it to feel the drops in my face and the smell of wet land. I think of the faces of the strange people i crossed in the street on my way home. Eahc of them seemed so busy, so happy, so sad, so in a hurry, so angry, so afraid, so neutral, all of them for a different reason. I wondered what were they thinking, waht were their pains and battles and passions. Are they all that different from me?

I sometimes come home really exhausted and sad because I feel like I don’t have any friends. But I finally understand that that’s not it. I have good friends and I’ve been able to get along with people. The problem is that I feel this crowded solitude so often in my life, and it’s one of the worst types of loneliness. The one in which there are hundreds of people around you, but you still feel like you are alone. An it’s the worst because the people are there but you can’t reach them and they can’t reach you. I feel like I haven’t met anyone who truly sees me and how I’m drowning in people. Someone who understands my mind and loves it the way it is. I know my family and friends don’t. They of course love me, but to them how I function is a complete mystery. Sometimes I try to tell a joke or explain a really interesting thought (at least, interesting to me) and I rarely can make my family or friends laugh or make them understand and after a while I just bawl my eyes out, not because of anger or fear or sadness, but because I just can’t translate my thoughts to a language the human race understands. I feel like an alien most of the time. And I know there must be someone out there who will understand my mind waiting for me, and that person is probably waiting for me as well, and that they will come when I least expect and when I learn to accept me for just me. But it becomes much harder time after time.

I look down and watch the cars buzzing and the drivers yelling at each other and a group of pedestrians laughing and a father holding hands with his child while crossing the street and the luminous sky and the cloudy and rainy but warm sun and hearing the rest of my family arriving and my mom asking them if they want cake and them saying yes, we do and having a lot of fun and everything within a radius of a hundred feet away from me feeling like a rather good and busy day in the city.

And yet I never felt more alone in my life.

But it’s okay. Sometimes we have that kind of day where everyting is nostalgic. But I shouldn’t be worried because I am fine, and even if not as more fine as I was yesterday or last week, I know I will be even more fine tomorrow.

That’s how life is. No matter what we do and the people we know, the only person who is going to be with us through it all is us. The only person who truly knows how we feel, and how sad it is to be in a crowded solitude is us.

So we better make it a good company.