Home Alone

Somewhere in all the preparatory literature the Peace Corps gave me, there’s a section about the serious challenges a new volunteer faces. Among them is loneliness. Loneliness! Does loneliness have an antonym? Because that’s the state I’m in. Over-socialization, maybe. Interpersonal saturation. I’ve never been so un-lonely in my life.

I have an hour to myself in the early morning. After that, I have not a second alone. I don’t even pee alone (the stalls at work have a waist-high wall so you can chat while you do your business). Then I come home to a baby-blitzkrieg of little sister madness and eventually go to sleep in a bed that’s a glass door away from the living room. (In a strange and ironic twist, everyone here loves the Home Alone series.)

When I go over to someone’s house as a guest, which is often, it would be shocking and rude to make me sleep alone. More often than not, the women all bed down in one room and the men take another. It’s like camping inside. It’s great. My co-worker slept over last weekend and told me that she wanted to stay in my room because she’s afraid of the dark.

And then, on Tuesday, Damir and Feruza told me they were going to visit some friends in Uzbekistan for a couple days. The girls would go to their grandparents’ house, which is close to their school but twice as far from my work. It made more sense for me to stay at home, alone.

If this had happened four months ago, I might have been excited. I like being alone, and I’ve always thought I was the kind of person that needed to be alone sometimes. I would never have imagined that living in a foreign country (or anything, for that matter) could rid my disposition of that aspect. But, however improbable, spending time alone has gone the way of daily showers: once essential, now forgotten. (Green vegetables: still essential, not forgotten.)

A strange thing happened in those two days I spent by myself. My internal monologue switched back on. (I hadn’t realized it was off.) I began writing a lot, pointless, meandering essays; rereading old letters; mulling over certain significant events in my life. I conjured ex-boyfriends who hadn’t made it into my conscious thoughts for months or years. I sent serious text messages with serious content. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t the king-of-the-hill feeling that I had in high school when my parents left me alone in the house.

Perhaps this is a little far-flung, but it occurred to me that too much socialization can dull creativity. Getting used to constantly being with people wasn’t easy, but once I had adjusted, being left alone was like a dunk in freezing water. I felt the urgent need to participate in a dialogue, which I guess led to the moody writing and thinking. Maybe, I thought, being surrounded by a friendly crowd makes one feel complacent about proving his right to exist. The people around me appreciate my presence, you think, and therefore it’s worthwhile. Lacking that kind of affirmation, another kind must take its place: the creation of something that, perhaps, can serve the same purpose. This might explain the general indifference to creativity that reigns here, and maybe also the classic image of the solitary writer. Maybe brilliant literary characters are conjured to fill the place of a missing interlocutor.

Not to say that all writers must be lonely, just that over-socialization might squelch the impulse to create another entity to interact with, as it certainly has done for me.

I like writing and I certainly miss doing it in my free time. On the other hand, I am thrilled to be rid of the self-criticism that congeals in the stew of my own thoughts. My emotions in general are less intense, watered down by the constant flow of interaction. On the whole that’s an asset, brilliant when I encounter the small daily humiliations of being a foreigner and the constant horrific albatross that is sexual harassment (the only thing I feel utterly, and depressingly, helpless against).

On that count, Farouk is my savior. He’s my neighbor and coworker who walks with me to work every day, carrying my books if they’re heavy, always making sure to stay on the terrifying-dog side of me. He smells like shoe polish and defends me from skeezy drunk administrators at staff parties. Sometimes on our walk we teach one another new words in our various languages. (His recent acquisitions, by his own request: icicle, bicycle, fence, cemetery, dead people.) In America, his impeccable gentlemanly manners and deferential character would mean that he’d be jilted in love left and right, the kind of guy that girls say is “like my older brother!” and complain to about their insensitive boyfriends. Here, his parents will find him a similarly sweet, well-mannered and upright wife (sometime next year) and he’ll have a long and contented life with her. Who said arranged marriage is so bad anyway? It’s good for the good guys, anyway, because here, they finish first.