Lonely Little Orbit: A Letter

Kate Fishman

03/25/2020

The last full day of 2019 that I spent in Oberlin, Ohio was a Saturday in December at the end of finals week. All my friends had left in the days before. I’m a resident assistant, though, so at the end of every semester I have to close down the dorms.

Closing isn’t so bad, only 8am to noon, but working closing means I also have to occupy myself the day before on the tiny island that Oberlin’s campus becomes. It means drifting aimlessly down the main streets and waving to the friendly acquaintances who remain, hearing the utter silence on the ghost town of my hall and jumping every time a door opens, and feeling just a little bit delusional the way you do when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one, for the moment, to celebrate with.

That morning I did all my laundry, and it felt like loads. I folded everything into suitcases and stowed away the last of the memorabilia on my desk into a duffel. That week was the longest packing job I’d ever done, spent completely cleaning out my room before a spring semester in the Netherlands. I had the flu, and every day around 4 p.m. aches and chills would ripple across my body and I’d be pulled almost by magnetic force back to my dorm room. I’ve always found it more or less impossible to accomplish academic work in my room, so in lieu of drafting essays or compiling portfolios I would punctuate these depressing waking-flu-naps with tucking things away into boxes.

There was a productivity to that fatigue that felt weirdly useful; I could do only the smallest tasks on the days when it was exhausting to prop my head up in front of my laptop, but when I looked back I had succeeded in emptying my living space of myself. On this Saturday of spectacular aloneness, I sat down on my bed with everything but my sheets bagged up and realized that all I wanted to do was watch Euphoria. I hemmed and hawed over this for a moment, knowing that my Friend With An HBO Subscription was on a plane and feeling guilty about asking for the password—and then I decided, typing in my card info and beginning my one week (one week!) free trial.

I marathoned Euphoria—an eight-episode series with episodes that average an hour plus—in a single day. I ended up having a later night than I meant to, what with the incumbent early morning, but I’d decided what to do and I’d committed myself. (I emerged from Dascomb’s dusky confines twice: once for a torta—perfect, full of jalapenos—and once for chocolate). From the island of my bed, I became absorbed in one of the campiest dramas I’ve ever seen: a teenager camming, teenagers in love, a genuinely sociopathic white boy, Alexa Demie who could top me any day of the week, and so much glitter. Sometimes moments of Euphoria come flashing back to me like out of a fever dream (and usually I think what the fuck?), but watching this show was so fun. I was beholden to no one, and had nary a responsibility. I was just a person absorbed in TV who spoke maybe fifteen words total that day.

I’ve been thinking about that Saturday in December a lot since. It was such a peculiar moment—a blip in my school life and my general psyche that doesn’t gel with who I imagine myself to be. Rarely at Oberlin do I crash so completely, do I binge TV from the early morning late into the night and speak to no one and do absolutely nothing of substance. My relishing of that day might just make it “of substance,” though. I tend, as most of us do, to equate “substance” with productivity and momentum—feeling that I’ve accomplished something of monetary or résumé value. Even being social can feel like that sometimes, especially as someone who was a pretty shy kid: there’s an innately necessary and almost aspirational quality to time spent surrounded by friends, talking and laughing together. Watching Euphoria alone is neither necessary nor aspirational; it was a departure from my normal self, the person I am comfortable being. And it was strange to feel completely untethered from who I thought I was, if only for 24 hours; though cozy, this wasn’t one for the Instagram feed or the cover letter. It would have been a depressing response to a “what are you up to?” text. A good joke, maybe, but not sincerely me.

When campus is emptied out and you have nothing left to hold in your mind or your hands, it feels like a kind of heartbreak. Especially on the heels of goodbyes and finals and sickness, I felt rather heartbroken holed up in my room just eating and watching. Heartbreak, after all, is partly about recalibrating who we are in the face of something gone. Being alone with yourself can feel devastating—who you are is, suddenly, for no one but you. Come to think of it, it’s also a bit like being in love: intimate, surprising, engulfing. Little did I know that this chosen self-isolation would eerily mirror a state-mandated one a few months later. Little did any of us know.

These days, post-plane ride home from Amsterdam, I spend all my time in my house, aside from the occasional walk down a nearby trail. Our hometowns have turned to ghost towns, where people shy from one another on the street and give little half smiles, where restaurants are only for takeout and we try to use our TV bucket lists to feel something. I’m grateful that personal and motivational malaise is for the moment my biggest concern in all this: I’m well-fed and housed. Even so, every 36 hours or so I feel myself power down. Hopelessness and heartbreak nag.

The thing about the last day on campus is that there’s a distinct morning-after; you wake up and you go work closing, which is tedious but also short, and then you get on a plane and you go the fuck home. There is somewhere else to be, something to do with yourself, someone expecting you. You’re recentered in who you are: the airport anonymity spits you out and you return to a familiar room having accomplished something. You wrote your papers. And now you’ll do your holiday shopping, help cook and clean. There are gatherings to be had, and you will be there, and smile at people and talk with them. When I got home this semester, by contrast, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave my home again for two weeks. I couldn’t even go to the grocery store.

As an introvert, I don’t hate being in my house by any stretch of the imagination: I just waxed poetic about the decision to watch 10 hours of TV alone in my room on a Saturday. But I’m realizing that, given the choice, I choose aloneness that orbits other people. I choose coffee shops and long walks and browsing stores. Even alone in these places, I’m me: walking, writing, reading my book, meeting my friend to write or read our books together.

There are things I don’t know how to do right by myself. I don’t know how to do the readings. I don’t know how to make the presentation. I don’t know how to write the essay. I don’t know how to celebrate alone, most of all—I’m too old for imaginary friends. My house has turned into a tiny world I’m learning to live in—a world where finishing a novel or registering for next year’s classes are monolithic accomplishments—while the real world powers down around me. We’re used to the world never ever closing down around our tiny pieces of it—part of heartbreak is knowing that tragically, inevitably, life is going on and gives not a flying fuck. In this, though, we are all profoundly together: profoundly alone in our homes, staying away from everyone and everything, and stricken by a realization that it’s harder to be ourselves.

Maybe you need it—here is your permission. Eat the torta. Walk through the neighborhood saying nothing to no one. Binge the TV show. You’re heartbroken. Be that. Do that, for awhile, pretending it’s a choice, and be you, still, because you still are.