alone-together

A screechy choir of cricket-chirp pierces the low monotonous hum of air conditioner units. Somewhere in the distance – there’s a ballgame on the radio. Fast-speaking voices pitch to excitement as a player slides to second base.

Meanwhile my brother tends the outdoor grill on the drive. My mother sits nearby on a wicker lounge chair reading her latest book from the library. My niece curls herself into a round seat with her nose in a murder mystery.

The air hangs heavy in the hour before the mosquitoes drive us indoors for dinner.

My mother and I are visiting my brother, sister-in-law, and the kids on the New Jersey Shore.

During COVID, when borders and travel bans kept us apart, I posted a piece about how much I missed this type of time –

That gentle hour when you’re engaged in a solitary task in the company of nearby others who might be lost in a book, asleep on the sofa, or pottering in the kitchen.

I also mentioned a similar, but different version of separate-togetherness. The public kind. The pandemic banished these moments too:

Sitting in a crowded café, people-watching, scribbling notes in your journal while a brave, white-bellied sparrow hops onto your table, tilts its head, and makes off with a crumb. The shared solitude that envelopes libraries and offices too, where head-phoned workers sit quietly scattered around, click-clacking on keyboards — until that sudden conversational spark.

For many, the pandemic shut down the public version of alone-together. And for those of us who live alone, without occasions to travel to family or have visitors stay, we might wonder if we will ever sink into that distinct form of relaxation where loved ones lounge companionably close by, taken up with solitary preoccupations until someone looks up and says, “Do you remember that time …” and the reverie cracks into laughter.

It didn’t take a pandemic for me to realize just how much I treasure easy company while I float through my internal worlds.

“Doing nothing with friends is never doing nothing is it?” asked the boy in Charles Mackesy’s wonderful book. “No,” said the mole.

Long before it became more socially acceptable to dine out alone, I would head to local restaurants in the evening – bringing with me whatever writing I was at work on. Retreating to my home to write alone constrained inspiration and anyway, I felt I was doing two things when I wrote in my restaurants: I was out in the world, actually living, while also reflecting on what it means to live.

When I was home alone, I wrote in OmmWriter. Designed to declutter your digital desktop to make writing distraction-free, the app takes over your screen with a simple, no-frills writing space, makes your keyboard sound more like a typewriter and offers a selection of background, ambient noise to choose from – like falling rain. My favourite backing track created sounds of a person somewhere else in the house – boiling the kettle, shuffling down the hallway, gathering papers. That the app designers thought to simulate someone pottering nearby reassured me that I was far from the only writer who longs for unobtrusive company – even the imaginary kind.

Alone-together.
Shared solitude.
Separate togetherness.
I’ve often wondered what to call it – other than my most cherished type of time.

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