Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.
Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
As a rule, be more.
As a rule, I miss you.
As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small”. Don’t ask me why.
I’m sorry I don’t call enough.
Green Apple.
I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
༺What you actually want to ask is, “Are you lonely?”
He had once sent a song by Måneskin called ‘The Loneliest’ and you have heard it many times over.
‘You’ll be the saddest part of me.’ That’s how the song begins.
You are sorry you don’t call him enough.
💫The song reminds you of lonely people. You, him, others.
🐈Like that woman in the old house in your old neighbourhood who nobody really sees anymore. The doors are always shut. Creepers have sprouted from cracks in the ancient walls. Everything is discoloured, dishevelled.
♊It is funny how houses become sites of loneliness. Her husband died a few years ago. They say he used to beat her up.
After his death, she became an invisible person.
You go home to scout for such stories.
💟They say loneliness is now an epidemic. There is no antidote.
🦂Your aunt once told you the neighbourhood was cursed. With loneliness. The women, especially, were all abandoned. They left or were left behind. Like her.
🐽You didn’t believe in it until you became one of those women. You had run away.
ওBut you keep returning. Like how all the women did.
Lonely.
✅You have rationalised it. You are from that threshold generation. We crossed over from analogue to digital. We are called Xennials.
ꦚYou remember that once there was a time when computers were placed in air-conditioned rooms and you had to remove your shoes to enter the hallowed precincts of the temple of technology that promised a better world. A world where everything would be accessible. Time and space would collapse and new intimacies would be formed.
But we entered an era of isolation instead.
ꦡLove and loneliness have become synonyms almost. This is an era of almosts.
𝔍This is also an era of redundancy. Connected all the time and yet, so remote. They say you can get an AI lover now. Or borrow a lover. Or buy a hug.
Does that make you a little less lonely?
You have been thinking about the woman lately.
You have been thinking about doors, too.
Disappear, disconnect, dismantle, dissolve.
Like that woman.
Like you.
All these D’s.
Love, loneliness, loss.
All the L’s.
🃏The first two letters. The same and then they depart to form other meanings.
Like the door that splits in two halves.
The heart on it cut in two pieces.
Loneliest in its severance.
Are you happy?
(This article appeared in Outlook’s Valentine’s Day 2025 special issue on love and loneliness in the era of technology. It was published in print as 'Loneliest')
