The words that slip out of the lazy lips of the well-meaning might cause an unreflective man to suppose that there is a direct relationship between solitude and loneliness. There is not. The individual factors related to these two states are surely interrelated to so high a degree that trends can be plotted on a graph well enough; however, the outliers that scoff at that curve, be it linear or exponential or parabolic, attest to the complexity and nuance of the human condition.
So too, it is worth noting that solitude and isolation are not perfectly related concepts. It seems to this isolated man that there is necessarily an active agent that affects his isolation; whereas, he who finds himself in solitude may do so noting the passivity of its cause. Having defined so roughly the differences characteristic of both solitude and isolation, one might then reflect whether there is a more direct relationship between loneliness and isolation than the aforementioned comparison.
My personal experience may be just one dot that bucks an obvious curve, but the reason expounded below causes me to suppose that loneliness more naturally accompanies isolation. My reader is welcome to disagree.
The situation in which one finds himself in quarantine is an isolating one. So too solitude may be a fit descriptor; however, solitude is only an effect of a formal isolation in this case. Herein we find one who may have felt a latent loneliness forced to confront the fact that he is truly alone, assuming of course that no one else has been quarantined in his quarters. We may also find, in this case, that a man who had hitherto felt no noticeable sense of existential aloneness will tap into any reserves of the stuff that he has stored in his private abode.
With loneliness comes a flood of complicating emotions and philosophies that muddy the thinking of one who otherwise functions well – by all external indicators – under normal societal conditions. The presence of others to whom the individual believes he bears even the slightest social responsibility enlivens concrete expectations that he will impose upon himself in response to the way he believes he must relate to society. Loneliness, the feeling of one’s lack of any sympathetic presence, severs so tenuous a responsibility and upends self-imposed expectations.
Anyway, without waxing further on these lexical and philosophical ideations, it should be clear to my reader that I found my thoughts whirling around an overwhelming loneliness caused by the solitude of isolation. In a one-bedroom, 6th floor apartment on a street that usually buzzes with gas-guzzling activity, I stared my fifth week of quarantine in the face with a certain passive hopelessness.
Mother dead and father the one who should be. One-time friends gone years ago. Co-workers tucked away in their own domestic cells having never expressed an iota of interest in my life outside the office. Members, pastors of the church down the street with no idea who that insolvent man is who slips in and out of service in an attempt to forestall the collection of a spiritual debt. No one knows, so no one can care, and the illusory ties that bind me with the people of my city, country, world evaporate with all the interaction I used to have.
I used to keep a full bar, a relic of the past when I had friends still living in the city who I loved to host. I say “used to” though the disappearance of that bar is a recent development. By myself, in a matter of weeks, I drank all the scotch, bourbon, rye, tequila, gin, rum, vodka, and the random liquors acquired for making cocktails. I had kept the bar stocked, over the last few years mostly for myself, but now my three-tiered cart is empty of all but the mixing and serving paraphernalia. I used to sometimes make wine and beer for myself, an inconsistent hobby, and kept many bottles of different vintages of wine for hosting dinners. Again, it has been years since I hosted dinners for friends, but I kept the habit, indulging occasionally. Weeks’ worth of indulging carelessly has folded that habit into the past as well.
I used to invite the women I would meet on any of the many apps where you meet women to my apartment, the only company ever in my private space. When I could convince them to stay the night, I would treat them to the best I had, wake them easily in the morning to a little homemade breakfast, and politely send them on their way. Rarely did this sequence occur twice for a single woman; for years I have preferred not to encumber my social life with relationships I struggle to take seriously. The women I can convince to spend the night the first night, I struggle to take seriously. Of course, today any fresh prey is also in quarantine and is safe from me in this extraordinary time.
All the better, really, because I am consistently filled with regret every morning I wake with another by my side. The regret wells up from my sense of social and perhaps spiritual responsibility for these women, a sense of responsibility that is consistently overwhelmed by my selfish desires. I know there is a better way, but struggle to remember truly good when good enough guides me to the bedroom.
—
What moving would look like while the world is locked in quarantine, I really didn’t know, but that is hardly something that has occupied my mind recently, except in relation to a far more interesting and, honestly, troubling concern. A few days ago, a woman across the street, who lives on the 7th floor of her building, caught my attention. I had been out on my balcony smoking my favorite pipe, when I noticed her waving. She was looking right at me and obviously wanted to communicate, but was unwilling to scream across our urban canyon.
She held up a poster board of sorts on which she wrote her pre-recorded message. Though the street is wide enough that I had some trouble reading the message, I eventually got it. She wrote, “Man in apt. above looks/does exactly as you.”
It took some moments for me to read and process the words themselves, and even then, I was unsure of what she was saying. When she supposed that I had received what was written, she flipped the poster, and the other side read in three individual lines, “Exact same. No difference. Twilight Zone.”
I sat down, shook my head at her and raised my hands with my shoulders. She did the same, but then pointed above me, to what I could not see sitting in my chair. We watched each other for a while, I with a furrowed brow. I eventually went to the railing, leaned over, and looked up to see the back of a head that looked exactly like mine. I pulled myself back in fear of being caught. But caught by whom?
I calmed myself a bit and peered back over the railing. I saw the same thing, and as I turned my head down toward the road, I could see in my peripheral that he did the same. I backed under the balcony again and sat a while thinking about it. I looked back up at the woman, and she again shrugged her shoulders. She had communicated what she needed to, as dumbfounded as I was, I suppose, and now hoped to get some answer. If she was hoping for an explanation from me, she was looking at the wrong guy.
With a thumbs up to tell her “thanks,” I walked back into my apartment and directly up one flight of stairs. There have been no knocks on doors in our building for weeks. Delivered meals are kept at the guard’s desk and residents must go downstairs to pick them up. The same goes for mail and packages and anything else. All internal doors to stairwells or those of common spaces are held open with doorstops, so no knobs need touching other than those to our personal rooms. So, I walked up one flight of stairs and knocked on the door, and probably surprised any neighbors within hearing of the knock. Perhaps whoever lived across the hall looked through their peep hole to see what was happening. I’m not sure how they would have reacted to two twins meeting each other for the first time in no familial terms.
But they would not see that interaction, for the door was not answered when I knocked. I waited and knocked a number of times, but still no one came to the door. So I went back down the stairs to my own apartment, trying to listen carefully if the other man was also coming down the stairs from the floor above. I could hear nothing, so I supposed he was still in his apartment, unwilling to answer the door.
I went back to the balcony, where I found the woman waiting expectantly to find out whatever I had to share with her. I leaned out once more to look up and find the back of that familiar head looking up as well. I sat down once more and thought a moment. There were so many questions crowding my swirling thoughts, but there was one thing that kept pushing through the confusion. What I needed was to see this man myself. So, after I held my pointer finger up to the woman asking for a moment, I went into my bedroom to find some wrapping paper I was pretty sure was still tucked in the corner. On the back of a large sheet I cut off, I wrote in Sharpie a single word and went back out to my balcony.
The woman understood pretty quickly what I was asking for, and I am thankful that I was talking to a woman because I am unsure whether a man would have been able to grant my request: “Mirror?” As she entered her apartment to find a suitable mirror, I entered mine to grab my binoculars. The mirrored distance between the man on the 7th floor and myself would be double that to the woman, and I wanted to get as close a look at him as I could.
It must have been exciting for the woman to be caught up in this mystery, having been the one to expose it, and she clearly wanted to help me see it through. She came back outside with a full-length mirror that she must have pulled off of her wall. At first, she miscalculated the angle that I would need to see one floor above, showing me the sky instead. With some hand gestures, I was able to get her to direct the reflection down and slightly to the left, across many identical balconies, until I was able to see him in the corner of the mirror. By gently shifting those last miniscule angles, he came into full view. A thumbs up stopped the mirror there.
Wait, no, that was me, looking directly back at myself. With hand motions that less than a minute or two ago the woman could not quite understand, I was able to get her to reliably shift the mirror up so that I could see the man on the 7th.
I saw him in the mirror, reflecting across the chasm between. He too held a pair of binoculars looking up at a very slight incline, presumably at the apartment one floor above the woman, where no one held a mirror for him to gaze into. I stepped to the left, careful to keep my binoculars steadily focused on the mirror, and watched him step to the far left of the mirror and halfway off into the world of the un-reflected. I stepped to the right, and he did the same. I dropped my binoculars and could make out his form well enough in the mirror, though I could no longer see details in his face. After raising the binoculars once more to my eyes, based on about half of his face – for I could not see his eyes behind his lenses – I confirmed that he was me. No twin, but the exact duplicate of me, moving exactly the same, raising and lowering the binoculars at the same time, stepping left and right at the same time. I slowly backed into the sliding door of my apartment, and he did the same. I walked back out; so did he.
The woman across the way leaned her mirror on the railing of her balcony so that I could still see my man above, and she went inside her apartment. When she had left us to ourselves, I sat down, kept the lenses to my eyes, and watched him do the same. Again and again I made little movements that he untiringly repeated exactly. What I was witnessing I had not the faintest clue, but there was clearly something supernatural going on. Who this man was, I could not say, but I was instantly and obviously bound to him.
After some moments lost forever in dreamy contemplation, the woman returned and held up another poster board. The writing this time was much smaller, for she knew that I would be able to read clearly with my binoculars. It read:
Days ago I saw you both on your porches at the same time in the same way. Watched for days now, exactly the same, all the time. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing or if it was real or who was real. I have another board that says ‘in apt. below’ in case he was the one to look directly at my waving when I got your attention.
What does this mean?”
I again lifted my hands and shrugged my shoulders in the gesture that she and I had shared back and forth a few times. It seemed that that was enough for both of us, for now anyway, for what else was there to say?
I climbed the stairs once more and knocked on the door to no avail. I walked down to the guard station, thankful for the time and exertion the stairs provided, to ask who lived in 7-C. He gave me a name that meant nothing to me, a last name, at least, that was confirmed by the tag on the 7-C box in the mailroom. The guard said he thought that the man had moved in sometime in the last month, but had never met the guy. He didn’t have any more information and didn’t seem too interested to seek more – I had not tried to explain to him what I had just witnessed, which would probably have piqued more curiosity. What was the point of making someone think I’m crazy?
Back to my balcony I returned. The woman had gone, but graciously left her mirror exactly as it was. For the rest of the day, I either sat on my deck chair watching the man above, or performing some silly experiment. I walked all across the balcony doing different motions that he matched. I went inside, and I could see through the glass that did the same. I peeked around my curtains; he did the same. That night, when it was dark enough outside, I used all my lamps to create a strong backlight with which I made shadows while looking through a part in the curtains. He did the same. And at one point I saw the woman had returned in the shadows of her balcony and was laughing at me. Without any answers obviously forthcoming, she felt free to enjoy the absurdity.
I was unable to sleep much at all that night, though I eventually gave up on my experimental antics. I was awake to hear a bad windstorm that apparently the woman slept through, for her mirror was blown from the balcony and shattered on the sidewalk below in the morning.
In the horizontal morning light streaming down the street, I saw her come out, see the mirror was gone, and look down to see the pieces reflecting up from below. I held up my apology on another sheet of wrapping paper, and she waved it off, apparently considering the mirror a small price to pay for being a fellow detective in this very strange mystery.
With only days until I was scheduled to move across town to the small 2-bed, 1-bath house I was closing on (virtually, of course, to avoid unnecessary physical interaction), I did not have loads of time to simply sit in my apartment and wonder what was going on above me. There was very little hope for me finding out what I was doing up there too. I stayed inside mostly, too embarrassed to face other folks across the street who might notice what was happening. I had too many questions to confidently bring anyone else into my conundrum.
Who was that man? Just a ghost of me? Some kind of reflection? A metaphysical twin? Was he in essence me or another being? Did he have a soul, a different soul, or were we one? Was there a different set of physical, mental, relational, or spiritual ramifications for him and me?
Based on the fact that he would look upward to see no mirror across the street and no one on the 8th floor above him, I had to assume that he was likely parroting my movements and not the other way around, but who’s to say? Did he and I have different volitions, different wills? Did one lead the other, likely me leading him? Or did we act in unison with a single disembodied shared will? Was I making my own decisions?
I now have more philosophical considerations than I have ever had, and less ability to satisfy any. They have followed me from my old building to my new home.
As there is not a house directly above my house – nothing but sky, in fact – I have no idea what might have become of my brother, my twin, myself. There is no saying whether he still exists or was merely manifest in the last days of my time in the city or never really existed at all. Until I see something like it again, I will have to assume that it was a phenomenon of the mind that has passed and will not repeat.
But the man was real enough. The woman confirmed it. It was not only cabin fever. I suppose soon enough I will have to go to her apartment and talk about what it was she and I witnessed and to see if the man is still there somehow parroting what I’ve been doing or if he only exists so long as I am in 6-C. But we will have to wait until the quarantine is over to scratch that itch.
Until and probably beyond then, I am carrying the weight of another life. No longer can I selfishly drink my days away or ignore my easy sinfulness. There seems to be another to whom I am responsible, and I will not allow my own selfishness to damn his soul (just in case that’s how it works).
Why is it so much easier to feel the weight of moral responsibility now?
I don’t know. Weren’t we talking about loneliness?