Together, Alone
Abraham of London
[An apartment building. Eight floors. Forty-three units. The city outside is lit. The building inside is also lit. The lights are different kinds.]
It is 9:47 PM.
The building has eight floors. Forty-three units. In thirty-seven of them, at this moment, there is a light on. In thirty-one of those, the light is a screen.
I am not inventing this. I am describing a thing that is happening everywhere, in every city, in every building dense enough to contain multitudes, every night at this hour.
I want to tell you what is happening in this building at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday — in a city where people live within forty feet of each other and have, in some cases, lived side by side for three years without ever learning each other's names. I am going to describe it without argument, without lecture, without the kind of sentence at the end that tells you what you are supposed to feel.
In the building, someone is watching a film they have already seen. They chose it tonight because choosing felt like more than they had left. The familiar story asks nothing of them; they already know what happens. They are awake inside it, and for tonight that is enough.
In the building, someone is typing a message they will not send.
In the building, someone is standing at the open fridge. They are looking at the shelves. They are not hungry, exactly. They close the fridge. They open it again. They close it. Nothing in there has changed, and they were not looking for food.
In the building, someone is on a video call with a parent who lives in a different time zone. The call is warm and short. They hang up and sit in the quiet and feel, very briefly, the particular loneliness that comes in the immediate aftermath of closeness — the silence that is the shape of the connection that was there and has ended.
In the building, someone is reading the news. They stopped believing the news would contain anything that improved their understanding of anything approximately twenty-four minutes ago. They are continuing for reasons that are no longer available to them.
In the building, someone is lying in bed with their eyes open. They are not reading. They are not scrolling. They are not sleeping. They are thinking about something they said five years ago to someone who was hurt by it. The something was not catastrophic. Nobody died. But it surfaces sometimes, at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, in the dark, when nothing is happening to interrupt it, when the small cruelties of old behaviour sit up and ask to be looked at.
In the building, someone is typing I'm fine.
They pause. They read the message back. They send it.
They wipe their face with the back of their hand.
In the building, someone is reading the same sentence for the third time and understanding none of it. They are not sure whether the problem is the sentence or the hour or the thing that has been sitting unresolved at the back of their chest since this morning, unnamed and patient.
In the building, someone is watching a short video of a person doing something funny in a language they do not speak. They are laughing. The laughter is real. The person in the video does not know they exist. They will not remember this tomorrow. The laughter is still real.
In the building, someone is sending a birthday message to a person they have not thought about since that person's last birthday.
In the building, someone is composing a version of themselves. They are deciding which photographs to include, how to caption them, what the caption says about who they are and how they move through the world. They are being precise. The version they are building must be accurate enough to feel true and composed enough to feel like a decision rather than an exposure.
In the building, someone has the television on in one room and music playing in another room and is in neither room. They are standing in the hallway in between. They have been in the hallway for approximately four minutes. They are not sure which room they were going to.
In the building, two people are in the same room without talking. This is not a crisis. They have been together long enough that silence is a currency they have learned to spend without counting it, a territory they can occupy without mapping. Neither of them knows that the other is, at this moment, turning over the same unresolved thing in their mind. Neither of them will say this tonight.
In the building, someone is looking at photographs from a period of their life when they were younger. They were not necessarily happier then. But they were in possession of possibilities that have since closed — not by catastrophe, just by time and choice and the narrowing that is the ordinary consequence of becoming a specific person in a specific life. They are not sad, exactly. They are something that does not have a short word in any language they know.
In the building, someone fell asleep early, earlier than they meant to. They are still holding the glass. The screen has gone dark in their hand. They are breathing slowly. This is the most at peace anyone in the building has been at 9:47 PM, and they did not choose it — they were simply overtaken by it, which is its own kind of grace.
In the building, someone is wide awake who cannot stop being awake. They have tried everything they know to try: the dark room, the open window, the breathing exercise, the glass of water, the podcast at low volume. It is 9:47 PM and it might as well be 3 AM. The night is the night. They are inside it and it will last as long as it lasts.
In the building, a child is still awake who should not be. They have a device under the duvet. They are watching something very quietly, aware that this is against the rules, and the awareness of the transgression is part of what makes the watching feel important, charged, theirs. They will fall asleep eventually, the device still warm in their hand. An adult will find it when they check on them. The adult will set it aside without waking the child, without saying anything, not tonight.
In the building, someone is reading an essay about attention on a screen.
They are trying very hard not to check their notifications.
In the building, someone is writing something they will never show anyone. Not because it is shameful. Because it belongs entirely to them, and belonging entirely to them is what makes it worth writing.
In the building, someone is waiting for a message that is not coming. They have checked their screen three times in the last nine minutes. The waiting is beginning to settle into something different from waiting — something closer to knowing, which is harder to sit with.
In the building, someone is deciding whether to have the conversation that has been waiting since last week. They are sitting very still while they decide. The body will make the movement or it will not. The moment is already beginning to choose itself without them.
In the building, someone has just received the message they needed. They are reading it slowly. They read it again. They are the only person in the building, at 9:47 PM, who is unreservedly glad.
In the building, someone ate dinner standing up at the kitchen counter because sitting at the table felt, at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, like more than they had the energy to negotiate with.
In the building, someone left work at six o'clock. It is now 9:47 PM, and they are not entirely sure what they did with the hours in between. Not in the sense of having done something they regret. In the sense of time passing without being witnessed, even by themselves.
In the building, someone said they would call a friend this week. It is Thursday. They call has not happened. There is a version of tomorrow in which it does.
In the building, someone is scrolling through a list of things to watch. They have been scrolling through the list for nineteen minutes. They have not selected anything. They are still scrolling.
In the building, at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, thirty-seven windows are lit.
Some of them will go dark in the next hour. Some will still be lit at midnight, and at one, and at three, when the building is quieter but never entirely quiet, because buildings like this one are never entirely quiet at any hour — there is always at least one window that stays lit past the point when it seems like everyone else has stopped.
In the morning, the building will look like a building. People will pass on the street below and not look up. No one passing on the street will know what was happening in the building at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday.
This is not unusual. This is every building. This is every Tuesday.
The loneliness in this building is not located in any single window. It is distributed across all forty-three of them — differently shaped in each one, unaware of itself in most of them, not dramatic, not crisis-grade, not the kind that announces itself or demands remedy. Just the ordinary modern texture of being sealed from each other while each of us is turned toward a screen that turns outward toward everywhere except here.
We are together in the building. We are alone in the particular way the building is alone: proximate, sealed, each turned slightly inward toward our own light.
There is no argument to make from that. There is only the weight of it, the thirty-seven lit windows, and the hour.