Imaginary Photographs
In all her youthful visions of the future, of the job she might have, the city and home she might live in, the friends and family around her, Marnie had never thought that she’d be lonely.
In her adolescence, she’d pictured the future as a series of imaginary photographs, densely populated, her friends’ arms draped around each other, eyes red from the flash of the camera in the taverna or lit by the flames of a driftwood fire on the beach and there, right in the centre, her own smiling face. The later photos were harder to pin down, the faces less defined, but perhaps there’d be a partner, even children among the friends she would surely know and love all her life.
But she hadn’t taken a photograph of another person for six years. The last time she’d had her picture taken was at Passport Control, where she’d been instructed not to smile. Where had everyone gone? Now thirty-eight, she had grown up in the golden age of friendship, when having a supportive, loving community around you was a far greater priority than the vexed business of family, the strained performance of romance or the sulky obligations of work. The late-night phone-calls, the texts, the outings and board games, it had all been so much more exciting and fulfilling than her erratic love life, and hadn’t she once been good at it? A nice addition to the group if not the core, well liked if never adored or idolised. She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play ever smaller venues.
Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious, ordered lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London. Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment. And perhaps it was natural, this falling away. Real life was rarely a driftwood fire or a drunken game of Twister, and it was part of growing up to let go of those fantasies of perpetual skinny-dipping and deep talks.
But nobody took the lost friends’ places, and now she had revised her vision of the future to one of self-containment and independence, tea from a nice cup, word puzzles on her phone, control of the TV, her books, her bed. To eat, drink, read and ignore the clock, to live without the intrusion or judgement of another soul; the fantasy of being the last woman on earth. She couldn’t say whether a falling tree in a forest made a noise, but no vibration that she made would strike another eardrum and so she’d taken to speaking to objects. Not you again, she joked with the damp patch in the bathroom. Nice and fresh, she complimented the eggs. There you are, she bantered with the corkscrew, waving its arms in the air. In a film on TV, Marnie watched a solitary character give a long pep-talk to her reflection. Nobody does that, she told the TV.
But solitary conversation was like playing yourself at Scrabble, it was hard to be surprised or challenged. Sometimes she didn’t even bother with words, instead developing a vocabulary of small noises, fwa and petah, flu-ah and cha-ha, their meaning ever shifting. The radio helped, her days marked by the schedules, though the news was increasingly an hourly jolt of pure anxiety or rage that left her scrambling for the switch. She played music, listening to playlists called things like Coffeeshop Essentials or Rainy Day Piano, but no one had yet compiled a playlist for those sluggish Sunday afternoons in her one-bedroom flat, listlessly foraging on social media, incontinently liking posts, present but as anonymous as someone clapping in a stadium crowd. Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are, and the cursed hours between three and five on a February afternoon lasted forever, as did the same hours in the morning, times when she had nothing to contemplate but the same circling anxieties and regrets, times when she was forced to acknowledge the truth.
I, Marnie Walsh, aged thirty-eight, of Herne Hill, London, am lonely.
This was not seclusion or solitude or aloneness, this was the real thing, and the realisation came with shame, because if popularity was the reward for being smart, cool, attractive, successful, then what did loneliness signify? She had never been cool, but she wasn’t clueless either. People had told her she was funny, and while she recognised that this could be a trap, she was never intentionally sarcastic or spiteful and far more likely to mock herself than others. Perhaps that was the problem – her ex-husband had certainly put it high on the list – but she was kind too, thoughtful, always generous within her means. She wasn’t shy. If anything she tried too hard, a people-pleaser, though no one ever seemed that pleased.
There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are. As we get older the former gives way to the latter, and maybe this is who I am now, someone better off by themselves. Not happier, but better off. Not an introvert, just an extrovert who had lost the knack.
But it was not romantic loneliness, or only occasionally. She had married and divorced in her late twenties, in that alone a prodigy, and this great central calamity of her life had gone some way to cauterising those emotions, even if the scar still itched now and then. Since the divorce there’d been no one, not really, though she thought about it sometimes, that it would be nice to feel the warmth of another body in bed or to get a text that was not an authentication code or scam. It would be nice to be desired but let’s not get carried away. The risks involved in romantic love, the potential for hurt and betrayal and indignity, far outweighed the consolations. For the most part, she just missed other people, specifically and generally, and if the prospect of social contact sometimes felt daunting, exhausting, intimidating, then it was still preferable to this small and shrinking life inside her fifty-four square metres on the top floor.
Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood.
It was no good. She would have to go outside.