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When I held her, she claimed I was the only one who understood her - the dear girl, the poor dear girl.
I tried to chalk it up to an adolescent sense of alienation. I tried to view her in the context of her age, teenage angst, a lack of a sense of belonging that haunts us all when we are that young. She could have been drunk and said it to anyone. She's probably said it to her favorite teddy bear before, for God's sake. I tried to rationalize and reframe it to conform to the rest of the world's rhythms and cycles.What everyone else was prescribed to think and feel at certain points in their lives.
Until I realized I felt the same.
And I! A pinnacle of success and stability. I! who should not have come so undone at her feet; who should have wielded the authority and wisdom and common sense in this; who told myself that I was there only for her benefit and education. Dear I, who should not have let this become so personal.
I tried to be reasonable.
But she was alone, she was always alone, whenever I saw her - no friends, no symbols of membership, an unidentifiable and untraceable solitary shadow, in and out of the cafes. Silence and Solitude were her only companions, our only mutual acquaintances. Whatever alienation and isolation she carried with her far extended the standard serving ladeled to her peers. She knew too much, thought too much, worried too much, felt too much.
As I did.
Us two, we were lonely singularities, in seas and streets full of animated yet soulless vessels, who wanted only what they were told to want, whose desires were externally, vicariously imposed; never genuinely their own yearnings or curiosities. Among these we were wandering stars.
She was only a shadow in the cafe, but to me she was the most poignant presence in the room.
"You are the only one who understands me."
I tried to dismiss it.
But quietly I accepted it. Quietly, I knew she meant it, with a weight unassigned to anything she had ever said before it.
I realized for all the growing up I had done long before she was born, for all the years past that stage of life I was, the isolation had not left me at some discrete check-out point. It had only been suppressed. Upon this realization it welled up in me with such a rush that I ached.
My dear girl, my poor dear girl - how I held her with such appreciation after that, with such a silent, pathetic, lovers' wish, such that I would have been ashamed of had I wished it at any prior time, in any prior state of mind: "Please, please, don't ever leave - I don't want to feel that way ever again."