The Room Where Nobody Calls

Loneliness is not being alone. I want to be clear about that. Being alone is a Saturday morning with coffee and quiet and the luxury of hearing your own thoughts for the first time all week. Loneliness is being in a room full of people and feeling like a subtitle in a language nobody reads. It's the phone that doesn't ring. Not because no one has your number— they do— but because you've gotten so good at seeming fine that nobody thinks to check. Loneliness is the gap between how many people know your name and how many people know you. I've been lonely in a marriage. I've been lonely at a party. I've been lonely standing next to someone who loved me because the kind of lonely I was didn't have anything to do with proximity. It had to do with translation. With having a self I couldn't figure out how to make visible to anyone who wasn't me. If you are this kind of lonely, I want you to know: it's not because you're unlovable. It's because the frequency you broadcast on is rare. And rare frequencies take longer to find. But when someone does— when someone finally tunes in— the signal is worth the static.