How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

by Lane Moore

I scoffed like I didn’t care, but I cared.

Kids with stable home lives can Make Friends™ in that casual, take ’em or leave ’em way, but you, poor you, will want to MAKE FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!!! in a desperate, gasping for air while drowning kind of way.

You get to know them and share the same air, and you’re alive at the same time, which is a gift in and of itself.

That intense Anne of Green Gables romanticism, bursting from every cell in my body, came from a similar place in me as it did in Anne: a tragic backstory and a desperate need to belong to someone.

We don’t give the people who don’t have the right connections and supreme wealth the map to where the opportunities are, and then when they forge a path there themselves, against immense odds, we charge them a fee for admission we know they can’t afford.

Help, if it came at all, arrived in short bursts, so I just had to savor it as much as I could, because I knew it would end and that would be that. I never got too comfortable or stayed too long, for fear of messing something up and having them take away the help altogether. Better to leave after they’ve been nice to me for three seconds, because what if this is a trick and staying for a full five seconds results in a punishment?

(I adapt so easily to any kind of communal environment, it’s a wonder I’ve never been sucked into a cult.)

I ate them up, emotionally first and physically later.

I was talking to a friend, Mary, whom, of course, I met through Instagram when she reached out to me to offer her home to me when I came to Tacoma with Tinder Live. She told me she knew it was probably weird because she was a stranger, but she’d love to have me stay with her while I was in town and also had a bunch of vintage clothes she was getting rid of that might fit me. I’m sure most people would see that and think it was nuts, but this is where my “Eh, fuck it, nothing’s killed me yet!” comes in handy. This total stranger picked me up from the airport as promised, drove me to her beautiful house, and now we’re friends. It’s unconventional, but I think it’s dreamy. I didn’t get what most people got, sure, but man, what a cool, weird alternate life!

So be the idiot who cares too much, be the weirdo who makes a difference, be the person who, even if you never know it, kept someone from wanting to die because you smiled at them on the street. And in that way, in the smallest of ways, you’re a little less alone. Because someone will remember you forever. In the way that I remember everyone who has ever been kind to me. I keep them all with me, so I know exactly where they are at all times.