If Travel Is Searching: Alone

[If Travel is Searching is the working title for my part of a collaborative writing project with E T A Nemo and the reason this blog exists. For more information on the project, see this POST]

There is a section in the story that has to do with being alone. Well, to be precise, it has to do with the difference between loneliness and being alone. The character is traveling and he’s thinking back on the moment when the lights went out, when everything changed. I used a moment from my life to get at this

I had just returned from a camping trip with two friends. It was a really crazy, but overall amazing experience. It was one of those experiences that you don't fully appreciate until it's over.

When you are lonely, you can only think in the moment. It’s the whole universe you occupy. You are solidly in your own thoughts and anything outside really can't register as real or tangible. You can try to compare what you’re thinking about to other things either past or future, but those things can't penetrate into that place you occupy. If something comes along to knock you out of that Zen like focus, you get carrying away with it. You don’t comprehend that something is here, right now, that has pulled you out of the doldrums of loneliness. You go from one Zen state to another. You ride a high. You don’t even think about where you had been. And then, when it is over, you’re deposited right back to where you were before the experience carrying you off. It actually becomes worse, because now, along with your loneliness you get another thing to viscerally compare it to. You were at one low point, then you were swept up in a moment that was the polar opposite of how you were feeling. Now you are back to loneliness with the awareness of how you could feel, of how you could not be lonely. It’s a shock to your being, your perception of the world. The end result is loneliness worse than the original.

I had been feeling this way before this camping trip was thrown together at the last moment, and it pulled me out of that place and into an exciting adventure with two fun people I cared for. When we returned and they left for home, I was instantly dropped back into the world that was there before I had left. I wandered around my apartment as darkness fell, fighting the all-encompassing feeling. Suddenly there was a blackout in my neighborhood. All the power went off for as far as I could see, leaving me with one half burned candle and a nearly dead flashlight. I paced a bit in the dim glow of the candle. I walked out onto the street, but there were no voices, no people out on their porches. I waslonely. Now I was alone in addition. I was alone with my loneliness. It was one of the most terrifying moments I’ve ever experienced. I walked down the street to get out of the tomb of my apartment. I had to fight off panic as I walked toward the light I saw a few blocks away. Once I entered the glow of streetlamps outside of the blackout, a few people were walking about, unaware of the dead zone I had just exited from. I stopped, content that the world hadn’t abandoned me, and walked back to my apartment. There the feeling descended upon me once more.

I used this to flesh out the character’s experience in the story. Of course, his blackout is all-encompassing and total, but the feelings he recall stem from my own. Loneliness and Alone. Two words we use almost interchangeably. Two words that are connected and sometimes co-exist, but at the core lies the difference between depression and stark, otherworldly terror.