Write your name on the wall of loneliness

It happened again today. Heart breaking in a public place.

A young Mandarin speaking mother sitting less than a metre to my left, exhausted as she tried to get her child to settle. Our eyes briefly met. A pale smile, flickering across the cosmic space of language, decades, and parenthood.

She was drowning, but I was unable to intervene. A few moments later, trailing her insistent son, she was gone – barely a sip of her tea taken. Steam still rising, fragrant and forgotten.

Then, while my eyes followed her retreat, it dawned. It was not her tired struggle. It was my isolation. I witness the sadness of the world because it is mine.

I glance at the abandoned teacup, contents going cold, and it is a mirror. A countdown. Shortly, we will both be poured away.

Brutal. Beautiful. Unfolding without exception.

My face is buried in my hands. My turn to drown. For this, there is no easy analgesia. No retail therapy, no booze. Not even diacetylmorphine will fix it.

I think of her through the gauze of projected sorrow, and as I do I look into her eyes once more. Dark, startling, open. I have to avert my gaze, switching focus to the final tufts of steam rising from her cup. Then I exhale the words I could have said aloud.   

Write your name on the wall of loneliness, and I will write mine next to it.

As I imagine this abstract graffiti, I am reminded, as if by a kind of absence, that just as we are profoundly alone, so too we are never alone.   

…

The waitress removes the teacup. I finish my coffee in shivers.