The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

by Marina Keegan

I always ask my students to append to their final essay a list of “Personal Pitfalls”—the aspects of their writing they wish to work on in the future. These were some of Marina’s: • Too much polysyndeton.* Watch it! • Don’t overdo the anaphora.** • Be careful of weird strange phrases and their prepositions. • Be careful of parallels. • Make your titles good! Don’t just choose them at the last minute! Avoid alliteration! • Make sure modifiers make sense. • Add more real stories when talking about general ideas. • Make sure to spell-check homophones like “it’s” and “its” by searching the document before finishing. • Don’t use too many adverbs in one sentence. • Similes must actually be capable of doing their thing. You can’t “curl up like a spoon.” • Unusual phrases work better at the end of paragraphs. • I lay an egg, I laid an egg, I have laid an egg. I lie, I lay, I have lain. • Topic indecision—just get over it! • Make sure tenses are consistent. • Don’t use two prepositions in a row. • Don’t get too attached to things. It only took you a minute to write that sentence! • THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING!

When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done.

She was a demon reviser, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting even when everyone else thought something was done. (THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.)

Marina wouldn’t want to be remembered because she’s dead. She would want to be remembered because she’s good.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.

I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should have . . . ,” “if I’d . . . ,” “wish I’d . . .” Of course, there are things we wish we’d done: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us. But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes . . .). We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

Aging is harder for beautiful people,

Did you know that before the Ottomans, mosques had no ceilings? I like that. It seems more natural to pray in the open air.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken. It’s the My Dog Skip effect. The Homeward Bound syndrome. When we hear that the lady on the next street over has cancer, we don’t see the entire town flock to her house. We push and shove and wet whales all day, then walk home through town past homeless men curled up on benches—washed up like whales on the curbsides.

I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism.

What an honor. What a responsibility. What a gift we have been given to be born in an atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide and millions of years and phenotypes cheering us on with recycles of energy. The thing is, I think we can make it. I think we can shove ourselves into spaceships before things get too cold. I only hope we don’t fuck things up before that. Because millions of years is a long time and I don’t want to let the universe down.

Are consulting firms inherently evil? Probably not. Are banks inherently evil? Probably not. Frankly, I don’t know enough about everything to make a statement like that one way or another.

There’s a German word I learned about in psychology class called schadenfreude, which means a pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. The word flips into my head like a shaming pop-up when a girl doesn’t get the internship either or a boy’s show is bad. I was lying in bed the other night wondering whether the Germans created a word for its opposite when I realized that the displeasure derived from the fortune of others is easier to spell. I should have thought to coin its green eyes.

The thing is, someday the sun is going to die and everything on Earth will freeze. This will happen. Even if we end global warming and clean up our radiation. The complete works of William Shakespeare, Monet’s lilies, all of Hemingway, all of Milton, all of Keats, our music libraries, our library libraries, our galleries, our poetry, our letters, our names etched in desks. I used to think printing things made them permanent, but that seems so silly now. Everything will be destroyed no matter how hard we work to create it. The idea terrifies me. I want tiny permanents. I want gigantic permanents! I want what I think and who I am captured in an anthology of indulgence I can comfortingly tuck into a shelf in some labyrinthine library.

I read somewhere that radio waves just keep traveling outward, flying into the universe with eternal vibrations. Sometime before I die I think I’ll find a microphone and climb to the top of a radio tower. I’ll take a deep breath and close my eyes because it will start to rain right when I reach the top. Hello, I’ll say to outer space, this is my card.