I did not expect to be lonely in a house that contains this many people.
There are, at last count, five children. The fact that we can say children in the plural sense and not just child in the singular, or even a memory of what could have been is, itself, a miracle and a blessing. And I recognize that.
The kids. They move through the house like weather systems. They are loud, unpredictable, occasionally destructive, and somehow always hungry. At any given moment, someone is asking for a ride, a snack, help with homework, or the Wi-Fi password, which has not changed since Obama was president, but is treated as a kind of sacred mystery.
And yet.
By 10:30 p.m., the house empties in a way that has nothing to do with square footage. Doors close. Lights go out. The noise drains away as if someone has pulled a plug. What remains is me, a computer screen, and the low-grade hum of a life that is, at least from an objective sense, full.
I sit down to write. Or rather, I sit down to intend to write, which is a very different activity and one that I have nearly perfected.
The screen glows. The cursor blinks. It has a rhythm to it. Blink, Blink, Blink. Like it’s tapping its foot, waiting for me to say something meaningful. I stare at it the way one might stare at a stranger at a party, hoping they will go first. They never do.
Instead, I open email. Then I close it. I open a document. I close that too. I check something I have already checked. I refresh something that has not changed. This is not so much procrastination as it is ritual, like lighting candles before admitting that you don’t actually know how to pray.
The strange thing is that I am not alone. Not technically. There are people around me. My kids, who once required bedtime stories and now require privacy, space, and occasionally rides to places they do not fully explain. I used to be the center of their universe. Now I am more like a municipal service. Available. Necessary. Not especially interesting.
Which is, I am aware, the goal. You raise them to leave you. No one tells you that they begin leaving in installments. A door closed here. A conversation shortened there. A preference for texting over talking, even when you are in the same house, which feels less like communication and more like a hostage negotiation conducted through a wall.
“Can you take me to practice?”
“Yes.”
“k”
This is the entire exchange. This is what language has become. We have achieved efficiency at the cost of, I suspect, something like presence. And so I sit in my office, in the quiet, wondering when exactly I became the man who stays up late not because he is needed, but because he is not.
There is, somewhere in my mind, a version of life where this is different. In that version, I am part of a community. Not the kind with a Facebook group or a quarterly potluck, but something olderand sturdier. People who show up unannounced. People who linger. People who know the names of your children and also, more importantly, know you.
This imagined place has the quality of a myth. It is less a plan than a foggy destination, like Brigadoon, appearing briefly, beautifully, and then vanishing before you can figure out how anyone got there in the first place.
I suspect that, in this fantasy, I am also a better version of myself. I am more available and more interesting; the kind of person people would naturally gather around. Like a fire on a cool summer evening.
In reality, I am more like a space heater. Functional. Slightly humming. Best appreciated from a distance.
It’s not that I don’t have people. I do. Good people. People I care about. But modern life has arranged us all into separate containers. We text to coordinate. We calendar to connect. We schedule what used to happen by accident.
“Let’s get together sometime,” we say, which is less an invitation and more a polite acknowledgment that we probably won’t.
And then the days fill. Work. Errands. Obligations. The relentless accumulation of things that must be done, leaving very little room for things that might simply be shared. By the time night comes, there is a sense that I have participated in life without quite touching it.
So I sit at the computer, staring at the blinking cursor, and I think “This is the part where I make something. This is the part where I take all of this. This loneliness, this fullness, this strange in-between. I turn it into something that reaches outward.”
But even that feels like sending a message in a bottle into a sea that is already full of bottles.
Blink. Blink. Blink. The cursor waits.
And I realize that the problem isn’t that community is a myth, or that it’s vanished into some Scottish fog, only appearing every hundred years for those who know the way. It’s that I am sitting here, waiting for it to come to me.
Community is not a place you find so much as a thing you risk. A thing you build by knocking on doors, by staying a little longer, by saying more than “k.”
Which sounds exhausting. And also, possibly, like the only way out of this.
So I type a sentence. It’s not a great sentence. It’s barely a sentence at all. But it exists.
It’s something.