Loneliness
Ricki T Thues 2026
I was in the solitary blackness of my mother’s womb. Two hearts beat in different time. There was oneness in my life.
There was a sudden thrust into a crowded room with people backlit with blazing, stabbing pain. One of the shadows held me by the ankles and struck me. I cried.
Hands reached out to draw me into the warmth and closeness of my mother’s breast. We were together yet strangely apart. I listened to the cadence of our two hearts.
The shapes of others peered in at me. Large hands ripped me away from my mother and held me close, rocking me gently. I saw a bearded face and one eye winked. I cried a lonely cry. The man returned me to my mother’s arms, and I was not alone.
Growing up, my siblings were always there. They played with me, teased me, welcomed and rejected me. The only time I was alone was in my crib. There was a rush to sleep where loneliness was not a threat.
In the neighborhood I sought out other children. We talked, told jokes, played games and shared small confidences. Mikey said, “Race you to the corner.” No matter who won, we laughed. Others turned away.
My loneliness began before I knew what loneliness was. Apartness felt like abandonment. Rejection was a moat with no boat.
Sometimes I was unkind, thoughtless, or simply incompatible with others. But sometimes the rejection had little to do with me. This child didn’t like my clothes. That one’s parents didn’t like my family. Some rejected an idea and not me. It still felt like loneliness.
In school I had some great friends, formative conversations and secrets that bound us together. Interests, humor and curiosity brought some to me and pushed others away. Six of us gathered around a marble circle in the schoolyard at lunch break. I aimed my steely shooter at a beautiful swirly and fired. The steely struck the marble and stuck in the middle of the ring. As I picked up the swirly, Jason yelled, “Not fair. You cheated with that steely.” He stomped off the field and never talked to me again. I liked Jason, but he never talked to me again.
My friend Mikey was always there. We played, studied, built a fort, and walked to school together. I was never lonely around him. We did not always agree, but we always forgave.
Eventually, Mikey and I went to different schools, but we stayed in touch. When the loneliness came, I remembered the good times.
When I found myself in a crowd I could feel invisible. At one school dance a crowd of classmates was laughing at Philip’s stupid joke. I wondered if anyone would notice if I stopped laughing.
And then came love. On my first date with my wife-to-be, we were sitting quietly together. In my mind, I was talking to her about shared secrets, the thrill of holding her hand, the closeness that I felt. Later, she told me that she had those same thoughts too. When we married, two separate lives became one. It was the beginning of a lifetime of closeness.
Our love brought its own histories, expectations, fears, and unfinished arguments. Affection coexisted with misunderstanding and desire. Through all of that, we were a cure for each other’s loneliness.
At my job, days became crowded with obligations. I was useful to people, trusted by some, loved by others. I learned that companionship emerged from shared labor and common purpose. Some colleagues knew my competence but not my doubts. Some enjoyed my company but not my deepest thoughts. I, too, misunderstood some and imposed my expectations upon them. Sometimes I withdrew when patience or understanding might have brought us closer. Some of us became friends. After work, over beers, Norman said, “Can you believe Sally?” We endured difficulties together.
Some relationships did not, could not last. Each departure left a space that could not be filled by someone else. Yet I continued.
Sometimes, I was not merely the victim of loneliness. I was also its unwitting architect.
Mikey, who I now called Michael, became my best friend. Our friendship did not begin with a solemn declaration that we would be there for each other until the end. It grew through the ordinary things that become extraordinary. There were conversations that wandered without needing a destination, laughter over things no one else found funny, disagreements that did not require an ending, and silences that never needed to be filled.
Michael knew my contradictions, my habits, my weaknesses, and the stories I had told often enough that I no longer remembered where I had embellished them. I did not have to be particularly interesting, successful, wise, or entertaining in his company. I could simply be myself. All these things were a cure for loneliness.
That is one of the rarest forms of companionship: to be known for who and not what you are.
Even then, we remained two separate people, a very human alone. I had thoughts I could not express and feelings Michael could not entirely understand. We carried different memories, interpreted events differently, and sometimes disappointed one another. Our friendship did not abolish our solitude. It made that solitude easier to bear.
Years accumulated. Friends moved away, became occupied with families and careers, or drifted toward interests we no longer shared. Coworkers retired or disappeared from my daily life. Some relationships ended through disagreement; others simply lost the repeated encounters that had sustained them.
No one had necessarily abandoned me. Life had distributed us elsewhere.
Age brought another kind of separation. My contemporaries and I had changed. Ideas once shared had diverged. Familiar conversations became difficult, not because affection had vanished, but because we no longer inhabited quite the same world. I sometimes found myself longing for the person an old friend had been, while recognizing that I, too, was no longer the person my friend remembered. This was an aloneness that felt like loneliness.
Then death began to be a reason for aloneness.
One friend died, then another. A familiar voice ceased to answer the telephone. The people who remembered my earliest adventures became fewer, until memories that had once belonged to a circle of companions rested almost entirely within me. I could tell the stories, but the people who would have laughed at the right moments were no longer there.
When my dear wife died after so many years together, I was lonely. But my loneliness was evidence that I had been loved. I was not entirely alone. Someone visited. A relative called. A neighbor stopped to talk.
Michael remained, though the years had changed us both. We could no longer assume that we had unlimited time to finish a conversation or make up for a missed visit. The ordinary pleasure of seeing Michael was accompanied by gratitude that we could still see each other at all.
At last, my life approached its end.
I lay in a bed, my body weakened, the world reduced to the room around me. The sounds of ordinary life continued somewhere beyond the door, indifferent to my final hours. I had spent a lifetime moving through the world, making choices, changing my mind, loving people, losing people, and wondering what it all meant. Now there was little left to do but be.
Michael sat beside me. We did not need to fill the room with words. So much had already been said, and so much had been wordless that silence no longer felt like an absence. Michael held my hand, and I felt the reassuring warmth of another human being.
Whatever lay ahead, it would be mine alone to experience. Yet I was not abandoned to it.
I looked at Michael and saw more than the person sitting beside my bed. I saw the years we had shared, the younger people we had been, the mistakes we had forgiven, the laughter we had forgotten and rediscovered, and the countless ordinary moments.
I realized that I had needlessly spent much of my life searching for the assurance that I was not alone.
Michael had never needed to become me, nor I Michael. We had simply continued to reach across the distance, year after year. That was enough.
I would die alone as I was in birth. Michael would witness it, grieve over it, and love me through it, but the final passage belonged to me.
As I felt his familiar hand holding mine, I understood something I had struggled to learn. I had been alone and I knew what loneliness meant. I had spent my childhood seeking acceptance, my youth seeking belonging, my adulthood seeking love and understanding, and my later years learning to live with absence. I was sometimes responsible for my own isolation. I had also been welcomed, cherished, and fortunate enough to find a friend who stayed.
At the beginning of my life, I had cried, and someone had brought me near.
At the end, someone who was simply there.
It did not abolish the solitude of being human. I came into the world alone. I would leave it alone.
Between those two moments, I had found family, love, friends and Michael. And in the end, none of us were truly lonely.
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