Q

The feelings i love and hate most are curiously intertwined, a fact i only realized today.

On one hand, i love feeling like i’m the only one in the world. On the other, there is a deep fear of being the only one left in the world.

From the time i started making my way to school every morning, i’ve come to savor those moments alone – before anyone in the house is awake, when i have the place and air and time all to myself. Everything is quiet, liberating, my own.

Solitary walks are another one of my indulgences. I’ve done two, three hour walks around neighborhoods just to be by myself for awhile. Sometimes i sing my lungs out at the roaring traffic.

One of the closest times i’ve gotten to complete solitude was recently, in Taiwan. While trekking Yang Ming Shan, there were stretches where i could see neither what was ahead nor behind me. As if my world consisted of the immediate steps i was on and my furiously beating heart. All else was fog. I’ve never felt so alive.

I knew i found my special someone when i wanted to – and could – share this solitude with him. Rather than feeling the urge to catch a breath somewhere alone, i feel a peace that never suffocates. I knew that when the feeling of delicate solitude extended and encompassed HS, whenever we stayed out late into the night, the streets a ghost town, the air crisp from un-use.

“Don’t you feel like we’re in a video game where everyone else are NPCs and only we’re real?”

Sometimes it’s really just us. The city streets turned upside down with every last human shaken off its tarmac. Only Lana Del Ray’s deep, reverberating beats in our side of the one earphone we were sharing. My nose was cool with midnight condensation and my brain fuzzy with near sleep, but i didn’t want this shared solitude to end.

On the other end of the spectrum –

but also what i suspect to be just the flip side of a mobius strip –

is that utter loneliness i feel in my insomniac nights. When every single person, one by one, drops off into a peaceful sleep. When I’m the only one left awake, my mind buzzing like a singular lost radio-wave shuttling in space without receptors. I scroll through Telegram and count the last seens move further away from my current time. Facebook green dots flitting into gray. “I am so lonely.” I always think then.