One's Company

by Ashley Hutson

Back then I never shared my plans or preferences, my ambitions or desires. I never gave away the things I loved. I knew better. Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject.

Love was a sickness. It had poisoned me. People lie when they say misery or loneliness kills; it’s love. Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.

Grief was ugly and embarrassing.

Grief was worse than death or crime. It was humiliation.

So far my strategy of barely being alive was working.

Shouldn’t October be cool, crisp, apple-flavored?

And then she’d smiled a little, and I could have wept. The kindness of others was the worst.

From the top of the mountain I masqueraded as an engaged citizen with an audience of zero.

The world felt large and doomed, yet everyone seemed destined to carry on normally.

Commercials blasted in between national news reports, as did the latest music about love, love lost, love never had. Global ruin was discussed constantly but no one could imagine it. It was like any other year.

I didn’t want to spoil myself. But occasionally I went on internet binges, the aim of which was the same as a junk-food binge: I would make myself sick and then swear it off completely.

However, it’s one thing to wish for solitude, and another thing to embrace it.

Money was like drugs or a favorite food—as soon as I had it, all I could think about was losing it, for its purpose was to be used, so the having was never permanent.

I had possessed all of the things that a traditionally good life were conditional upon. I was functionally human. Why, then, had that life always felt like a pastime, just something I was doing while waiting for my other self, the actualized, better version of myself, to come along and make it real?

Instead of sucking the energy out of me the way most people did by merely existing, her presence gave me a second breath.

I resisted the urge to take her hand. Tending to this plant was, perhaps, the most intimate thing I had ever done with someone.

People who declare things impossible lack a ruthless imagination.

Escape would not be allowed. There is no escape from other humans, from being human.