You Are Here

by David Nicholls

This was not seclusion or solitude or aloneness, this was the real thing, and the realisation came with shame, because if popularity was the reward for being smart, cool, attractive, successful, then what did loneliness signify? She had never been cool, but she wasn’t clueless either.

There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are. As we get older the former gives way to the latter, and maybe this is who I am now, someone better off by themselves. Not happier, but better off. Not an introvert, just an extrovert who had lost the knack.

‘The trick is to change the way you think about time. It’s no use thinking in minutes or hours or days, or even generations. You’ve got to adjust the scale, think in terms of millennia. Then everything you see here is temporary, the lakes, rivers, mountains, all in motion, the changes taking place over millions of years. This valley wasn’t always here: it was created, gouged out by a great glacier, because ice is a moving thing, just a couple of feet a day but scouring and chewing away with these great teeth made of stone,

At home he was merely lonely. Stepping outside transformed loneliness to solitude, a far more dignified state because it was his choice.