The New York journal

Loneliness

It finally came. The loneliness i mean. I was having fun, not kidding, i was really having fun in this city supposed to be a monster who will eat you and just leave your chicken leg bones in the middle of a street in Brooklyn. I was feeling really positive, a lot of energy, always looking new stuff to do, go to see the bridge, go to the movies by myself, maybe have a beer alone in a bar or trying to meet with the few people i know here. But loneliness came on silently, almost a week after i arrived while i was walking around in Manhattan and saw all the buildings and all the lights and the cards and the cold air entering my nose all the way down. I had spend all day in Manhattan doing paper work on the bank and suddenly it was night and i just walked so much, so intensely through the streets searching for something i wasn't sure what. At a moment i felt silly just going up and down, up and down, killing time, stealing small things from the department stores, things that i don't really need, finding myself at Washington Square watching the kids and their skateboard doing tricks and everybody around them getting excited when one of them did a decent trick.

Everybody was companied or seemed confident of themselves but me, just there alone staring not to go home and be locked in. And then i started to feel lonely but i tried to shake it off just by walking or entering smaller stores, clothing store, record stores, sex shops, what ever apealling to the eyes, anything with a little  extra color. At some moment i saw a Magic the gathering store, game that i used to play when i was a kid and which i still play sometimes when my friends tell me about a new edition of whatnot. The store was full and everybody was doing their thing with their friends or their acquaintances realizing that i had not even an acquaintance there. The loneliness came back, harder. 

Then i decided to go home and started walking to canal street which was a thirty minute walk (I really wanted to be tired when i got home) to take the train. The buildings looked empty but i knew they were not. There was a small street closes like an alley. A really fancy place with only nice cars park out side. I could only imagine the kind of rich people living inside because i would never get to know that kind of wealth. For some reason i started imagining a place that looked like San Bernardo, with my family, but in Manhattan. A place we could had lived in another dimension where i could have had everything i wanted. An invented past in those streets was hard to imagine; my mom walking, my cousins playing, my grandfather eating watermelon, my father drinking. But now, for some reason, i could. That place didn't existed but i still missed it. It was alive in my imagination. An imagination mixed up with memory and at that moment i wouldn't know what was real or not. In that place i wasn't feeling so lonely. 

I wanted to cry. Something thick and gummy stayed on my throat. My eyes got wet and for some reason my only reaction to get out of reality, to stop feeling, was looking at the screen of my cellphone each 15 seconds. No messages, just the time, scroll down while walking, load again, no messages, scroll down and up, scroll down and up. Lock the cellphone. I don't like this song. No messages. 

I started sending voice messages, just a few people responded. It's so easy to trick the feelings this days, but no matter how much scrolling and song changing i did, the thick gummy thing on my throat wouldn't go away and the moisture of my eyes stayed there. The memory of my imaginary life and past stayed there too, between the buildings until i got to the subway station where everything got left behind me.