A solitudinous state

Loneliness had been our familiar affliction. My mum was an only child to an only child who had never really wanted kids. She had played alone while my grandparents argued about their lost youth and missed opportunities, my mother constantly being the source of the blame.

By the time she was eight, my mother had found solace in her isolation. She sat in silence, reading good books and watching bad TV.

Ten years later, she met a man who was as quiet as she was and tried his best to make her happy. He provided this only child with her own only child and, once this job was done, he quietly, as was his way, passed away.

My mother and I were then alone. These years, though shadowed by grief, were the happiest of my life. My mother would rub my back when I was sad and play with my hair while we watched TV. We would talk and laugh and sit in comfortable silences.

Then one day, the day before my eighteenth birthday, the affliction struck again. My mother, on her way home, was driven off the road by a drunk driver, and I, like my mother before me, was alone.

My mother’s childhood home had become hers and now it was mine. I sat inside all day reading good books and watching bad TV.

Entering my mother’s untouched bedroom, I sat on her bed, breathing in her perfume. I looked around the room and in her closet, I found a purple jumper with a dinosaur on it. This was a jumper my mother had worn often. The color was fading, and there were moth holes near the collar. I put it on and let it drape over me, the bottom clinging to my knees and the smell of my recently deceased mother filling my nose.

Lying in her bed, I looked over at her nightstand and saw the photo I spent my Sunday mornings staring at. With the sun bleeding in through the curtained windows and my mother snoring next to me, I would stare at that photo and the people in it who looked like strangers. My parents smiled back at me from behind the glass of the chipped frame, and I wondered why this was the only photo of either of them in the house.

Picking up the photo frame, I decided it should live downstairs on the fireplace. As I placed the frame on the mantle, I caught the edge of it with the sleeve of my mother’s jumper and watched in slow motion as it hit the wooden floor and smashed. “Fuck,” I yelled to no one.

Cleaning up the glass and remnants of the frame, I threw it in the sink to worry about later. I then looked closer at the photo and realized it had been bent in half. On the flip side of the photo, there was a woman much closer to my mother, a woman wearing the same jumper I was in now, a woman I had never seen before.

Who was this woman? Why was she wearing my mum’s jumper? And why was she standing so close to my mother? Had I been wrong this whole time? Had my mother had a friend, someone she spoke to outside of me, and if so, why had I never met her?

With loneliness as my affliction, time had become my virtue. Therefore, finding this woman, however long it took, became my obsession. I didn’t have much to go on: one picture and a jumper. Rooting through my mother’s drawers, I found a floral tin box containing one half of a friendship bracelet—which I put on my wrist—and a postcard from Brighton.

The postcard just said “to M.L (my mother) love D.B.” This really wasn't a lead; D.B. could be anyone. It could be the woman in the photo, or it could be someone else. Maybe my mother had loads of friends. I lay on my mother's bed and started to realize I never really knew her. The one person in the world I had was actually a stranger to me. Reaching over to put the box back, I saw a business card for a coffee shop in Bath in the space the box had taken up.

This was a lead.

After a few hours online, I found out D.B. was Deborah Bellingham, and she was the owner of a small coffee shop in Bath. She had six children, a husband, lots of friends, and three very large dogs. This woman was the opposite of lonely.

Jumping in the car without really thinking, I headed for Bath. My mother had taught me to drive, but the furthest I had been was the supermarket ten minutes down the road, whereas Bath was a two-hour drive on the motorway. I had always been scared of driving, especially after my mother died, but now my fear had given way to obsession. I was a woman with one goal: to find and meet the only other woman my mother knew.

Standing across the road from the coffee shop, I saw a young woman serving customers. She had the face of the woman from the photo, just younger.

“Hi,” I murmured.

“Hello, what can I get for you?” she asked.

“I’m, um, hi. I’m looking for Deborah?” I finally got out.

“Oh, um, Deborah. Unfortunately, she isn’t here at the moment. Can I help?”

She looked at me with confusion. We must have been of similar age, but I could tell she had never felt loneliness. She smiled at me like she knew me, a smile she gave to everyone.

“Could you message her? I really need to speak to her. Let her know I am May Learman’s daughter.”

She continued to smile at me, but her eyes shifted to intrigue.

“Okay, I don’t know who that is, but let me text her.” She pulled out her phone and motioned for me to sit at the nearest table.

I sat down, pulling the jumper as far over my knees as it would go, and looked down at the top of the table. I traced the grain of the wood with my finger and waited for D.B. to arrive.

The woman from the photo sat across from me with a face of worry and concern. She rested her arm on the table and was wearing the other half of the friendship bracelet.

“Hi, Alex,” she said, holding out her hand to take mine, but I pulled it away before she could touch me.

“I’m Deborah, your aunt.”

My eyes shot up to hers, confused about what she had said. She took this confusion as an opportunity to carry on.

“I was your mother’s sister.”

“My mother doesn’t have a sister. She’s an only child, like me,” I answered, trying to read her face.

“I know she told you that, but I am her sister. That’s actually my jumper you have on.”

I stared down at the jumper, then back at her.

“Your mother wasn’t well. I kept trying to get through to her, to get her—well, you really—out of that house. After your father died, she isolated the two of you, and I didn’t think that was fair.” I looked blankly at her, thinking about all the time we spent in our house, how I never left, how she kept me from school because she didn't want to be alone.

A tear ran down my cheek as Deborah carried on. “Your dad and she, well, they weren’t really suited, but it got her away from our parents. After he was gone, it was like, well, like she was a child again. She never wanted to go outside or see anyone.”

I stood up from the table, unsure of what to think. Deborah walked toward me, and before I could pull away, she wrapped her arms around me. She rubbed my back like my mum did and played with the bottom of my hair. She smelled just like her.

I didn’t know what to do. Had my mother caused our affliction? Had she kept me lonely on purpose? I pulled back from Deborah and looked at her tear-filled eyes as she carried on.

“I asked her to meet me a few weeks ago, and she came as far as the supermarket near your house. I told her I was going to come take you for a while, get you out of the house even if I couldn’t get her out.”

I stared blankly at her, trying to process her final words, putting the pieces together. “So you’re the reason she was out driving? The reason she got hit? The reason I'm now all alone?” I pushed Deborah back and ran out into the street.

Deborah chased after me and caught up to me before I could get inside the car. “Alex, please, I’m sorry, but you can’t keep living like this.”

I stared at her and finally said, “Well, it’s all I’ve known.”

She hugged me again. “I know, I know it is, and I’m so sorry for my part in that. But you don’t have to be alone now. We’re here.”

I stared into the eyes of a woman I had never met and realized the affliction wasn’t the curse I thought it was. Loneliness had been a choice not made by me but for me, by the only person I ever loved. But now, now I had the option to have friends, a family, a real life.