Silence and Solitude

I will never be the person I was before loneliness.

photo by Tonya Morton

When I think of silence, I think of Yankee Stadium.

It makes sense if you know the moment I’m picturing, which was last August. I was standing alone, eating a hot dog, at a staircase above one of the balconies. I had never been to Yankee stadium before (the “new” Yankee stadium, if you care, but I never went to the old one either.) And while the game was undramatic, the stadium itself had been so unrelentingly loud the entire time, the only word to use for it was “assault.” The noise was a constant assault. The music, the taunting chimes after a second strike, the “let’s go” singsongy chant when a batter was in a clinch moment. All blared from the speakers at such a volume it was impossible not to wince. 

In a moment of in-between action, a lull between assaults, as the Nationals’ hitter missed another pitch, I walked down the staircase to the concessions and bought a hot dog. I found a place to eat it alone by the stairs leading down into the next section. It was the middle of the fifth inning. Nothing important was happening. Alone with my hot dog, with no one yelling over my head and nothing playing on the sound system—only a distant crack as the hitter fouled his next swing—I closed my eyes and thought “Oh god. Silence.” 

Joy may be the relief from pain. Silence is the relief from the Yankee Stadium PA system.

I’ve stolen the title of this piece, “Silence and Solitude.” It was Paul’s title first, but I’ve coveted it for years and now I’ve stolen it. Silence and Solitude—he knows how to come up with these perfect, simple, self-explanatory titles. Because isn’t that everything? Silence or the wish for silence. Solitude or the wish for solitude. Aren’t these the topics beneath all the other topics? Maybe just for me. And maybe just because I’m alone in the apartment for a week while he’s away, and I find myself suddenly incapable of finishing anything I start, incapable of sticking to any of the intentions I set for myself. I have a list of things I want to work on, but instead of doing them, I wander from my desk into the bedroom, then to the kitchen, then to my desk and to the window and finally back to my desk, unsure where to land. I hadn’t realized how tightly my days are tied to the schedule of Paul and Santo now. Without all the dog walks, the reminders to eat meals at normal hours, the conversations about what we’re doing and what we’re each planning, I don’t know how to set my mind to anything.

So, instead of doing, I am lying on the floor thinking about solitude. Thinking about Yankee Stadium and hot dogs and silence. There are different levels of silence and solitude, of course. Inner circles and outer circles. The apartment feels silent without Paul and Santo, but it’s still in the middle of New York City. I hear voices yelling out on the sidewalk below the window. I hear a car drive past. 

Lying here, it feels like I’m thirteen again, lying on my bedroom floor with my boombox. I remember lying there with the door closed and candles lit. Remember those floating candles that looked like flowers? Floating candles in little bowls around the room. Listening to music—Alanis Morisette or Paula Cole or Natalie Merchant—for hours. Teaching myself yoga from a pack of flashcards. Solemnly acting out a spell from one of my witch books. I remember drawing circles on the carpet with…was it salt? Did my parents know about this? Healing spells. Centering spells. Love spells. I was a good witch. I remember teaching myself Chakra meditations and feeling my forehead burn, my chest burn. 

I used to light my candles and incense, play my music, and then lie there staring off into the future. Maybe I felt alone those nights. But mostly, I remember feeling like the whole world was out there, just waiting for me to arrive. Bright, warm lights shining in the city of my future. 

photo by Tonya Morton

Now that I live in New York, I enjoy what relative forms of solitude and silence I can find, little moments of relief. Mornings at the river. Sundays walking up Hudson Street, before the shops open. Holiday weekends when everyone leaves town. It’s a special form of peace, the quiet city. And, despite this current blah feeling, I do generally enjoy my solitude when I find it here. 

For instance, there is a particular tea shop on the upper east side. This was a while back, but now that I think of solitude, this day was an especially sweet example. I was due to meet Paul at the Museum of Modern Art that afternoon, but I had a couple hours beforehand, so I took the train an extra stop and went to this basement tea shop I love on Lexington Avenue. I read my book at a worn wooden table in the rear, near the kitchen, tucked against the wall, which is my favorite place to sit in a restaurant, nestled into a corner with a view of the people coming in and out, the waitresses traipsing back and forth through the hallway to the kitchen. I ordered tea and two scones, and I read a chapter or two while I ate. When I had finished, I checked my emails. One in particular, a New Yorker review of a postwar collage exhibit in a gallery on 66th street. After I paid my bill, I walked to 66th street.

I saw the collages, then I walked into the park, past families buying tickets for the zoo. I passed by the shop at the Dairy Barn, and circled the playground. And finally, when I left the park, I was on Columbus Circle. A mistake, which required a jog back along 59th street to make it on time to 57th and 7th. 

Is there any way to express what a pleasure that day was? To be one New Yorker among 8 million, traveling in comfortable solitude through the city. To walk anywhere I wanted, to see the collage exhibit just because it was there. To drink tea and read my book in the precise tea shop I would choose, for the amount of time that my taste prescribed. I felt the rare sensation of knowing how special that day was even as I experienced it. I promised myself, I will keep having days like this. 

And maybe some of the joy was in knowing I had someone waiting for me on 57th street, someone to tell about the collage artists and the tea shop. It was a transient form of solitude, but important to me, nonetheless. 

One day recently, I turned off the wide canyon of 7th Avenue and glanced to my right into the window of a shadowy off-hour restaurant. There was a woman seated there, alone at the small table in the window. She wasn’t looking out. Her face was covered by her hands, buried into them. One elbow nearly touched her glass of water on the white tablecloth.

I only saw her for a moment as I passed by. It would have been rude to stop and stare at her. But I admit I stopped and looked back once I was past. It was maybe two in the afternoon. The restaurant was nearly empty. All I saw was this woman, alone at a table for two. Left there by the waiter, on her own in the window like a display. How long did she sit like that? Her long fingers covering her eyes, the distraught, forward fall of her blonde hair. 

What lies between her and me? Different days, different seasons. 

photo by Tonya Morton

I think of Kansas as a silent, lonely place. I think of South Dakota as a silent, lonely place. But that’s only because I was often silent and lonely when I lived in each of those places. Starved nights driving around after closing time, past dark buildings and dark windows. Empty days when the silence grew so thick I couldn’t break through. The landscape of the plains seems to me to invite loneliness. The deep, empty bowl of the country.  But that isn’t the land. It’s me. 

At its dark bottom, loneliness has no landscape. Or if it does, it’s black and lifeless rock, a flinty path where you scrape your feet. I met a woman who was in the worst of it once. She was a friend of my mother’s, and I met her just the one time, a long time ago. She had lost her husband before we visited. That was why mom wanted to stop. To see that this woman, her friend, was okay. 

We sat with her outside in her beautiful garden and she smiled at us because she knew that was the appropriate thing. She set the table in the garden and she granted us the favor of eating with us. She was able to keep up a conversation. But we clearly weren’t real to her, not then. 

“I have people around me all day now,” she said, when Mom asked her. “People visit me, like you. It matters and I appreciate it, but it doesn’t really make my situation any better or worse.” She looked down at her food. She had been eating as if she knew we were watching to see if she ate. It was another of the day’s tasks. A way to fill one moment, then the next, cutting into her chicken and placing it into her mouth, setting down the fork, over and over again as time moved painfully forward. “The loneliness–” She broke off. 

This is why I remember her. Unlike most of the other names and handshakes of my parents’ friends over the years, she didn’t pretend for me. She didn’t lie.  “It doesn’t matter whether I’m in this house alone or not,” she said. There were tears on her face. “The one person I need with me is gone.” 

I didn’t know yet about the dark, flinty place. I was only seventeen. But I remembered her, I drew that woman’s words to mind, in the days after my father died. When I found myself in the place where time is a material thing, something to hold in your hands. Where time is your only hunger, and you blister your fingers all day and all night along the rope of it. If only you could draw yourself back, just a little way along the rope. Not far at all. It’s just right there—the past. He was here only a day ago. Only a moment ago. His shoes are right there. His hat is still on the hook by the door. It’s still the sharpest loneliness I’ve ever felt. 

He was always teaching me about being alone. My father, I mean. I think about that a lot now—what my dad would have wanted for me. What he would be proud of. He told me, when I was seven or eight, “You need to know how to be alone.” Looking back, I see how he hoped he could inoculate me against the worst of life’s mistakes. He wanted me to avoid all the things you do when you don’t want to be alone. 

But who ever avoids those mistakes? 

I do love to be on my own. I haven’t had much time to myself in life, and my own company is so undemanding and so sweet to me. I love to walk along the street and not wonder how anyone beside me is feeling, whether they are tired, or would rather do something else. I love those moments when I am not straining to please anyone at all. 

photo by Tonya Morton

The lonelinesses of my life—mostly they were when I wasn’t alone. Standing behind a front door that doesn’t open to anything. Traveling a rope of time that leads nowhere. The gray ache that feeds on silence, on cold surfaces and window glass.

Those lonelinesses have all grown older with me. It seems as though they harden with time. Not like steel, more like the bark on a tree. They mature into strength. Into acceptance and resolve. I will never be the person I was before loneliness. I can only be this self, and then whoever I will be after the next loss, and the next. 

 A few years ago, I asked my mom how that woman was doing, the one with the dead husband and the garden. She was doing just fine now, she said. And my mom herself, a decade after losing my father, is doing just fine. Me? Most days, I am fine. Sometimes, yes, without any reason, I will miss my dad so strongly that I have to stop and catch my breath. I will feel him, and the wrenching loss of him, as if it just happened. And sometimes I feel the loneliness of my marriage again, like a stone dropping into my heart. 

But now I have fallen in love. A risk, I know. God, it’s always such a risk. On a normal week, a week when Paul hasn’t driven down to Florida to shoot photos and write another book, I return from my solitary walks to find him waiting for me. I rush in and tell him what I saw out in the street. I bring in the bustle of the city to him with stories and bags of groceries and bouquets of cheap cut flowers. When he has been out, he blows back in with stories and boxes from the bakery and more flowers to bring the city to me. And at night, when I close my eyes, I know he’ll be there when I wake up in the morning. It is a weakness of love, that time becomes a web wrapping around the two of us together. I hate how the hours feel aimless now without him, how much I am struggling to make sense of this apartment on my own. Dithering on the carpet, not sure if I want to eat, or go out, or just lie on the floor all evening. I don’t know how to enjoy my solitude if he isn’t here to welcome me in from the cold.

When I fell in love, I had to welcome the ghost of loneliness back into my heart. That chilling thought, the nightmare—but what will I do if I ever lose him?  

I have been lonely in my life. And I’m thankful for it, because it’s the loneliness that taught me what comes after. All my mistakes and the nights spent walking the blackest, sharpest ground. Each time, I found a safe footfall on the path of time. Each time, I came out again.

It’s impossible to inoculate yourself against loss. Impossible not to be devastated again. But in the silence, and in the solitude, I do know what part of me would still be standing. 

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