[Lonely Anywhere]

I used to stalk the Facebook pages of people like whom I most aspired to be. Scouring their lists of favorite books and movies and musicians, I fell deeper, desperately—I knew these were the kinds of things that made a person.

Freshman year of college, I met a girl named Sarah in my Darkroom Photo II class. She was in the year above me, a slim, shy girl from Tennessee, who wore red Dansko clogs in the lab, slipping them on and off her feet as she processed her negatives, or looked at them through a loop against the light table. She listened to The Everybodyfields, an indie folk/alt-country band from nearby her home town in Tennessee. The band was co-founded and fronted by Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews, who met in 1999 while working at a summer camp.

In the summer of 2007, at a sleep-away camp in upstate New York that I had been attending for five years, I met a guy named Jonah. It was his first and last summer in attendance. He was a junior counselor and I was a “super senior,” fifteen when he must have been eighteen.

I bought three albums by The Everybodyfields on iTunes—the only albums they released before splitting up, an all-too-common consequence of forming a band with your significant other. I listened on my headphones in the darkroom, turning on the enlarger for two seconds at a time, another two seconds, and again, moving the mat board at each interval, a test to determine the correct exposure time for a particular negative. I assumed Sarah was listening to the same songs as I watched her move her photos from the stop bath to the fix, then walk her tray from the red light of the darkroom to the incandescent outer lab to check her print. I don’t remember anything else, any other favorite books or shows or music from her profile.

When I make lists, I never cross things off. I simply turn the page and make a new one, including all the tasks never accomplished from the days before. A rotating replenishment of things that must be said. When Jonah messaged me on Facebook out of the blue four years later, the same fall semester that I took a photo class with a slim girl in red Danskos, I imagined a life with him. On The Everybodyfields’ 2005 Album Plague of Dreams, there’s a song called “By Your Side.” I belt it in the dorm shower.

I still get pretty nostalgic about camp, he told me. There was just something about that whole experience that was so perfect and wonderful. I would really like to go back, but I’m not sure if trying to recreate that same experience would be a good idea or not. It’s just something I think about often. He had recently graduated from college and bought himself a one-way ticket to Portland. His family was from the Northeast, which, as you know, is kind of industrial in nature. But you go out to the northwest and it’s all so green and the air feels so much cleaner, and there’s a lot more of a push for an active lifestyle. Everyone is about outdoor activities and riding bikes and I feel like I’d be really comfortable there. That and I feel like there are all these little signs that tell me that’s where I should be, that that’s where I’d thrive. I’m just following my instincts and seeing how I like it.

The Everybodyfields’ music has a kind of country-leaning vibe that I’ve been told is unexpected of me, but which reminds me of summers looking up at the stars in Hilton Head—a brief respite from the near-empty sky I’m used to, a new perspective, a new sense of where I stand in context—of a kind of storytelling like in broadway musicals, of singing “Golden Slumbers” with Jonah at the picnic tables while he played guitar, a rehearsal for a visiting day performance. Nothing romantic ever happened between us, no encounters beyond those few brief rehearsals at the picnic tables and two performances onstage, but I remember him with a kind of warmth granted to someone who once loved you, who you trust always will.

Nostalgia’s a deceiving thing, I wrote back. You think it’s about what was happening, but it’s really about how you felt. For five days we messaged back and forth. Re-reading now, I see myself yearning to escape the city, to surround myself in nature, like when the grass is long enough that you can just feel it coming up all around your body as you lay on your back. I always pass those sorts of places when I take the train: farms or fields or similar spots where they just stuck some train tracks but seem to have left the surrounding area untouched. I don’t recognize this version of myself, expressing these desires most likely adopted to match what I saw in him, and reflected back. There’s also the stars: only on incredibly rare occasions have I ever seen a sky full of stars. I saw them at camp, I may see them on vacations or something, depending where I go, but on a regular basis, the sky is lacking, and I am literally left every night staring at the sky, enjoying the phenomenon where you can faintly see a couple stars wayyy up by staring harder into the blackness of the sky. Was that explanation clear enough to understand? I don’t know what kinds of skies you regularly see.

Sarah made collages, combining her own photographs with images she found in vintage magazines or postcards. She installed them in the corner of the classroom, one image folded in half exactly where the walls met. Once, alone in the computer lab, playing a song from The Everybodyfields’ 2004 album Halfway There: Electricity and the South, Sarah walked in. She asked how I’d heard about the Everybodyfields—they were a local band from her hometown—and I told her a friend of mine had recommended them. The Everybodyfields’ final album is titled Nothing is Okay. The ninth song on the album is titled “Everything is Okay.”

Perhaps the point isn’t to recreate a past experience that once left you feeling wonderful, I told Jonah, but to look around for opportunities to find the feeling again. Where you’ll find it now will likely be different than before, because you’re a different version of yourself, and you’re looking for different things. I’ve listened in the middle of the night, in the yellow light of bedrooms in Baltimore, in Paris, in Berlin, and in my mother’s apartment. When I could still hear my roommates chatting on the couch, but I couldn’t hear the music anymore because it had been playing on a loop and I’d completely tuned it out, fading into the background until I shut my laptop and heard an unexpected silence. I wish for the allowance to express things without words, or where the words I have aren’t quite the ones I need. To communicate through listening.

Around the same time, I decided I would learn to speak Esperanto, a universal language composed of recognizable bits and pieces from other western languages, constructed to be fair in its small points of entry for anyone who wanted to learn it. But Esperanto is actually spoken by very few, so rather than being equally understandable to all, Esperanto is just equally ambiguous. Speaking Esperanto, I’d be an equal distance from everyone. Still, I started to learn more about it. I used Google to translate quotes from artists I admired into Esperanto and posted them on Tumblr. I wrote vocabulary words into my notebooks. I titled projects in Esperanto, which saved me the struggle of coming up with titles that carried the right meaning. I joked about the effort I was exerting to learn a language no one else would understand, that I was building myself a void in which to shout. But this goal somehow felt safer than the way I had been operating. Sometimes, when the failure to connect to another person feels particularly devastating, or the risk of this failure looms particularly large, I wish that I could point to something aside from myself, identifying that thing as the wall between us. The other person in a conversation feels far away because they don’t speak my language. If mine is universal, but they still don’t understand, at least I made my best attempt. I signed up for a free Esperanto program online. I emailed my Lesson 1 exercises to the instructor. I never followed-up, waiting for his response. He sent me my corrections a year later.

I posted on my Tumblr, that early endless-scrolling void, Are you still reading this? Within minutes Jonah replied, Yes.