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

by Lane Moore

You book that trip for yourself, you take yourself to dinner and enjoy it the same as if someone else took you out. You take all that love you keep giving to selfish idiots and try to throw some of it in the general direction of your own heart and you pray even a little bit of it sticks there. Maybe all that shit boomerangs around, maybe it doesn’t. I can’t know. But if everyone did it, we wouldn’t feel alone ever. 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. But truly, as borderline depressing and kind of lame as it is, I’m a little less alone because you bought this book and you’re right there, right now, being alone with me. And you should know I’d hug you if I could. So, so much. And I would tell you that you are loved and you matter and you are trying so hard. And that you deserve love and that any love you haven’t received yet is waiting for you somewhere out there, and I know you’re getting impatient and you’re ready for it now, but it’s coming, hold tight. And to not let the world and how it’s been in the past make you cold and shut-down and scared, because it can just as...