The End of Loneliness

by Benedict Wells

I’ve known Death a long time, but now Death knows me.

What is it that makes a life into what it becomes?

My thoughts roam further and further back in time, until at last they settle on the calamity that overshadowed my childhood.

Later, when they were gone, we were forced to realize that we knew nothing about them, absolutely nothing.

It had rained again in the night; fat dewdrops clung to the leaves, the fresh morning air wrapped itself round my skin.

In those days I didn’t know the meaning of fear.

Up until then my life had been a sheltered one, but clearly there were invisible forces and currents that could change everything at a stroke.

It seemed that there were families that were spared by Fate and others that attracted misfortune; and that night I wondered whether my family were one of these.

“The most important thing is that you find your true friend, Jules.”

“Your true friend is someone who’s always there, who walks beside you all your life. You have to find them; it’s more important than anything, even love. Because love doesn’t always last.”

there was never enough. The hunger in us could never wholly be stilled.

My fears grew like a crack slowly spreading in all directions. I began to be afraid of the dark, of death, of eternity.

I was increasingly retreating into myself, and I sometimes secretly hated myself for what I had become.

All this has been sown in me, but I can’t see what it’s making of me. The harvest only comes when I’m grown-up, and then it’s too late.”

I felt an ashen sense of inferiority that would never fully leave me in the years that followed.

“Sometimes lies are better.”

In that moment I saw in her something that she was and did not want to be. Above all, though, I saw myself through her eyes: what I’d become, and what I had not.

Liz’s eyes are black and unfathomable. The eyes of someone falling, falling, falling. And she loves the fall.

he didn’t have a single vulnerability. Nothing could hurt him. That fascinated me.”

sensed the others’ proximity, and how warm and cozy it was in our house. But that all seemed very far away, because I was deep inside myself and the only thing there was cold fear.

A difficult childhood is like an invisible enemy, I thought. You never know when it will strike.

The smile comes suddenly, and it’s so disarming and beautiful that for a few seconds I’m not worried about him at all.

I was too uncommunicative, too inauthentic, and she couldn’t stand that look of mine anymore: like I was off in my own, inaccessible little world.

I couldn’t have expressed it clearly at the time, but in my heart I sensed I’d lost my way. The problem was that I didn’t know when and where. I didn’t even know which way it was I’d lost.

We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.”

Look at you, I thought: why do you so often long for solitude in company when you can scarcely bear to be alone anymore?

“Hope is for idiots.” “So is pessimism.”

“This constantly being alone is killing me.”

but the antidote to loneliness isn’t just being around random people indiscriminately, the antidote to loneliness is emotional security.”

There’s a hunger in me that has never been satisfied. Nine years of ravenous hunger, and no matter how many pizzas I eat these days, it’s never enough.”

From then on I met my fate with indifference, and what followed was a meaningless period, disposable as crumpled paper.

The real talent was the will.

“No one can turn back the clock.”

“Damn it, Jules, I don’t want to fight with you. I just don’t want you to suddenly wake up and you’re nearly fifty and you’ve missed all your chances. You’re still dreaming yourself into another life.”

“You have to finally forget the past. Do you know how many people had it worse than we did? Your childhood, our parents’ death, are not your fault.

What is your fault is what these things are doing to you. You alone are responsible for yourself and your life. And if you just do what you’ve always don...

And I hit the little black mark again and again, but all I’d got wasn’t enough, it just wasn’t enough, and the ball never struck the top. That evening I opened Alva’s present.

“Maybe you’re not writing on paper, but you’re doing it in your head,”

“You always have. You’re a rememberer and a preserver, you just can’t help it.”

“So you know that feeling,” I said calmly, “when life has been poisoned by something, right from the start. Like black liquid poured into a basin of clean water.”

“I don’t like to say this to you again, but you can’t bring back the past, or change it,” said my brother, on the phone. “Yes,” I said, “you can.”

Time isn’t linear; nor is memory. You always remember more clearly things you’re emotionally close to at any given moment.

Should I tell her what I only surmised and could barely admit to myself? That it was an unconscious sense of guilt that had made me waste the best years of my life, stumble into the wrong university course and pick up the camera again?

That all these years I’d denied myself the chance to write, even though I loved it?

He was an expert at hiding his true condition. A house with the facade still intact while everything inside was collapsing.

There were things I couldn’t say; I could only write them. Because when I spoke, I thought; and when I wrote, I felt.

“You’re sleeping with a woman you love,” he said dully. “Everything you write now is either terrible or very good.”

“I have to let go; do you understand what that means? To know that your own life will soon be over? That you have to bid farewell to your mind because it’s leaving you, never to return?”

“Life is not a zero-sum game. There are people who just have bad luck, who lose everything they love, little by little.”

It pained me that the time I’d spent with them was receding further and further into the past, that it was now just part of the long-ago first third of my life.