There is a peculiar quality to friendship that reveals itself only in hindsight, like the way you never notice the hum of a refrigerator until it stops. When you are surrounded by people, friendship often feels like a disturbance. It is the text message that arrives just as you have settled into a comfortable silence with yourself. It is the obligation to listen when you would rather be thinking. It is the compromise, the scheduling, the small negotiations of attention and energy that drain the day of its simplicity.
We tend to think of loneliness as the absence of something, but that is not quite right. Loneliness is the sudden awareness of what was there all along, the space that friendship occupied without our permission. When you are alone for long enough, the disturbance transforms into architecture. You begin to notice the hollow where another person’s voice used to interrupt your thoughts. The silence stops feeling like peace and starts feeling like a room with the furniture removed.
The irony is that we rarely appreciate the friction of connection until it is gone. A friend’s unannounced visit feels like an intrusion until you have spent three weeks speaking to no one but cashiers. The group chat notifications seem like noise until they stop coming and you check your phone with a kind of hunger you did not know you had. We are built this way, to accommodate the weight of others until we are left with only our own gravity, and then to feel the unbearable lightness of having nothing to carry.
There is no lesson here, no resolution. The disturbance returns when the loneliness fades, and we forget again what it cost us to be alone. Perhaps that is the only way it can work. We cannot hold both truths at once, the value of solitude and the necessity of interruption. We live in the oscillation, grateful and resentful by turns, never quite settled, never quite alone.
