November 29th, 2021 - The Hollow

Dear TNY,

“The Hollow”.  Okay.

You know, I was told last week that my rants about all of your stories are the same.  Too many characters.  Not interesting.  Not fresh.  Not this and/or too much that.  And that’s likely true. I want to say that’s because your stories all suck in the same way.  But maybe it’s my preference that’s off.  Maybe the things I want to read aren’t “literature” at all.  That this truth I’m looking for isn’t what art is about.  Maybe she (from last week’s letter of arrogance) was right, you know?  Maybe the people do get to decide and have decided and I should just shut the fuck up.

I don’t know.

It’s not like I’m making myself happy doing this.  This project, FTNY, it doesn’t please me, per se.  If anything, it exists out of a need to be heard.  Or want to be heard. I’m not sure which it is, need or want. Regardless, in this forum, you can’t talk over me.  I have my freedom.  I’m free to have any old opinion I want and I can air it out.  I can hang it way up high on this pole.  But it’s just a pole with a flag on it in the middle of an empty field.

Do you know how lonely that is?  That one of the few places I come to for freedom, in my whole fucking life, all interactions included, in which I try desperately to matter, is an empty field? That in order to be heard, I have to speak to no one? That’s so fucking alone.  Achingly alone.  And if I want to feel less lonely (superficially, mind you; distracted) I have to shut up and not be free.  I have to let you talk over me.  I have to accept that all these stories you print are the best we can do.  I have to stop struggling for the idea of better. 

It’s no wonder I drink.

I don’t think I’m going to make it through life, man.  I know no one does.  Terminal at birth, sure. But still.

I don’t know what I’m saying.

I found out a couple of days ago that medicine is beginning to study loneliness.  They are documenting the difference between depression and loneliness.  How the mind and body try to respond to loneliness, to cure it.  How hard it is to fix loneliness.  Did you know that the definition of chronic loneliness, in which no matter how much contact a person has with other persons, they don’t feel seen or heard, is feeling lonely for more than seven years?  Seven fucking years.  After seven years, the brain has patterned disappointment so well that it will tell a person to not even try.  To eschew the desire to be vulnerable with another person because they’ll just leave.  They don’t care.  You don’t really matter to them.  The brain interprets these signals as physical pain.  A “don’t put your hand on the burner” sort of pain so that you don’t get hurt again. The effect of which is such that your brain is telling you NOT to try to cure the loneliness, because trying to cure it will only hurt worse.  And this is different from depression, it turns out.  Curing depression, if that’s a thing, doesn’t necessarily rely on anyone else. It responds to medication. Exercise. Etc. Loneliness cannot be self medicated away. It relies on others (which, as humans, we are wholly unreliable) and, worse yet, even if you put yourself around other people, you can’t make yourself feel connected.  And if it’s chronic, after seven years, you close down and you may never feel the deep feeling of togetherness again. 

What I’m trying to say, I think, is that I’m lonely.  And I think that loneliness appeared on my radar sometime around 2006.  I think it really came into focus a few years later, probably closer to 2009 or 2010.  Crystal clear, certainly, by 2012.

I don’t know what to do about it.  Write these stupid fucking letters?  Travel and see people, as I do now, build things for them, make their lives better such that after I leave, things work the way they want them to or look the way they want them to, etc?  Do you know how exhausting it is dipping into and out of others’ lives, seeing what it is to have a life, and then leaving, a utility to be used at the next location?  Do you know how exhausting it is to make your desires known and then watch as the people you care about most don’t even take them into consideration?  This is how a person ends up like this.  You just stop talking about the shit that matters to you.  Who is listening anyway?

So, TNY, what the fuck?  Why do I even tell you this shit?  On one hand, it’s crazy to think that I’m still fighting. That despite the depth of this well, I’m still shouting from the bottom of it hoping that you’ll hear me.  Maybe that’s good.  Maybe I haven’t given up.  But, on the other hand, maybe I have given up.  I yell at you because I know the outcome here.  You don’t listen.  You can’t hurt me.  You have nothing to take away from me.  You’ve given me nothing.  Maybe you are a big fat fucking give up.  And like an abusive relationship, I stay.  I stay because, even though I despise it, I know what to expect.  And, sadly, maybe I’m so fucking lonely that I stay because I have nowhere else to go.  Who would I talk to if I didn’t talk to you?

Fuck me, guys.  Fuck me.

Anyway, this story should have been a novel, possibly written by John Irving.  But as a short story, the first eleven pages could probably get cut down to one.  Too many paragraphs were spent explaining large swaths of time that may have been consequential in a novel, but were not here; essentially, these paragraphs were delivering so much information through summary that there was a disconnectedness between the work and myself such that I didn’t really care about these people.  And, in a short form, this story doesn’t know what it’s about.  In a novel, it could have been about the relationship with Sophie, the hollow, and Valente.  All three would have been possible.  In the short, only one is possible, and having three things dilutes the impact, rendering all of them weak.

I wanted to drink with Valente.  I wanted to know what was in the hollow.  Anything that didn’t serve those two points was misdirected energy.

But whatever, man.  If I mattered, you’d change.  And it’s not just me.  If anyone out here that reads your fiction and knows, as I know, that it isn’t the best we (humanity) can do, if any of us mattered, you’d change. 

But you won’t. Because we don’t matter.

So, you’ll keep talking overtop of me.

But it’s okay, honey.  While you’re at work today I’ll wash the sheets and dust the blinds.  I’ll vacuum the carpet and I’ll fix the dishwasher.  Before you get home, I’ll fire up those pork chops that you like so much and I’ll crack a beer for you when I hear your car in the driveway.  And don’t worry, I won’t even need makeup to cover these bruises because they are all internal. You don’t have to look at what you did.  We don’t ever need to talk about it.  It’s gonna be just fine, honey.  Tonight’s gonna be just fine.

Nick