A House Full of Empty Rooms
There is a peculiar kind of loneliness that success cannot cure.
You can have a large house. A good job. Money in the bank. A comfortable bed. A refrigerator full of food. People who answer when you call. Colleagues who respect you. Perhaps even people who envy the life they imagine you have.
And still come home to silence.
That is when you begin to understand that comfort and happiness are not the same thing.
A large house is wonderful until you realise that every additional room is simply another room in which nobody is waiting for you.
Money can buy a beautiful dining table. It cannot give you someone sitting across from it.
A successful career can fill ten hours of your day with meetings, decisions, arguments, victories and problems that urgently need solving. And perhaps that is why work becomes such a refuge. There is always another email. Another deadline. Another crisis.
Work gives you the luxury of being needed. Then the laptop closes, and suddenly, nobody needs anything from you.
The house becomes quiet. Night arrives and sometimes stretches all the way into morning. You lie in bed knowing that you should sleep, watching one hour quietly become the next. Midnight becomes two. Two becomes four.
There is something particularly cruel about watching dawn arrive when you haven’t slept.
People speak romantically about sunrise. But when you have been awake all night, sunrise can feel almost accusatory…sometimes depressing. Another day has arrived. But you are not particularly happy to see it. So you find things to do.
Recently, I have started sharpening knives. The fact that i had a number of blunt kitchen knives lying around helped! :-)
It is an oddly satisfying occupation. Not because of the knives, but because sharpening requires exactly the right amount of attention. Not enough to exhaust the mind but enough to silence it.
Stone. Water. Steel.
The blade moves across the stone at the same angle, again and again.
Slowly. Deliberately.
Heel to tip.
Again.
Again.
And Again.
There is something comforting about this activity that is completely mechanical yet intolerant of carelessness. Your hands must remain steady. (People who see me now will know that the punishment of carelessness can be messily bloody). The angle must remain consistent. The pressure must remain controlled.
For those few minutes, the universe becomes wonderfully small.
There is only the stone and the edge.
Perhaps that is why people who are lonely develop strange little rituals.
We organise shelves that do not need organising.
We watch films we have already watched.
We take unnecessarily long drives.
We scroll through phones containing hundreds of contacts and discover that there is nobody we actually want to call.
We invent ways of occupying time because empty time is dangerous territory for an overactive mind.
But again, loneliness itself is full of contradictions. Someone unexpectedly knocks on the door and your first instinct may be irritation.
“Why are you here?!!…Just leave me alone!!”
Get Ranjith Sukumaran’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You become protective of the solitude that you simultaneously despise.
You don’t want company. But you want someone.
There is an enormous difference.
You don’t necessarily want conversation. You don’t want another dinner party, another networking event, another room filled with acquaintances asking how work is going.
You want the one person before whom silence requires no explanation.
Someone you can tell the stupid thing that happened at eleven in the morning.
Someone whose footsteps in another room make the house feel inhabited.
Someone who knows when you are pretending to be fine and has earned the right not to believe you.
Someone you love. And perhaps, even more importantly, someone who loves you back.
That last part matters. Because love cannot survive indefinitely as a monologue.
There are people surrounded by families who are lonely. People in marriages who are lonely. People with thousands of followers who are lonely. People whose phones never stop ringing who are lonely.
I guess loneliness is not the absence of human beings but the absence of connections. It is having stories but nobody you desperately want to tell them to. It is accomplishing something and instinctively reaching for your phone before remembering there is nobody you particularly want to call. It is eating something wonderful and thinking how much better it would taste if someone were stealing pieces from your plate. It is standing inside a life you spent years building and discovering that you built everything except the person with whom you wanted to share it with.
Perhaps that is the great deception of adulthood.
We are taught to build the house, a great career, a fat bank balance, a reputation to kill for, becoming independent, becoming successful…becoming somebody who needs nobody…
And then, if we succeed spectacularly, we may eventually discover something almost embarrassingly simple — Being able to live without someone is not the same as wanting to.
A house becomes a home because somebody else’s life spills into yours.
A towel left where it shouldn’t be.
A cup abandoned on a table.
An argument about what to watch.
A voice calling from another room.
A message asking when you will be home.
Tiny inconveniences that, in their absence, reveal themselves to have been extraordinary privileges.
Maybe loneliness is not really about being alone. Maybe it is about having love inside you with nowhere to put it.
And so some nights, when the house is quiet and sleep refuses to come, you find something for your hands to do.
Stone.
Water.
Steel.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Until eventually the edge is sharp.
The night is gone.
And morning arrives anyway…
