Art, Winnicott thought, was a place in which this kind of labour might be attempted, where one could move freely between integration and disintegration, doing the work of mending, the work of grief, preparing oneself for the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.

last year i turned 28 in a blast of cocktails and oysters and delicious delicious brunch food, and spent the immediate next few days with one of my best friends, lying in the sun getting an uneven tan and breathing in sea-air, sleeping in a hotel bed and taking baths with jo malone bath oil that had the thick, luxurious scent of roses. on our first night in the room i finished the lonely city, which i had been eking my way through for the past few months. it was that some parts of it grew dry and difficult to read, and also that i was exhausted by a life i have known is becoming untenable.

laing’s text was much more cerebral, most parts an investigation into art and loneliness in art but also chock-full of feeling, though much of the book was spent burrowing into why we might feel loneliness / the ways loneliness might manifest in our life and art / the ways we might suture (to borrow her words) the gaps between us and other people, or if there’s even a need to at all. in very many ways this book found me at the loneliest i had ever been — and i don’t say that lightly. i have been very many kinds of lonely, mostly recently the anxious pacing sort, but i think that was the most acutely i’d ever felt it because for long periods inside this aloneness i felt compelled to twist deeper into myself and become quieter and quieter about it. i discovered that i don’t always need to cry and get through it, sometimes i grit my teeth and bear down and get through it as quietly as i can and it feels like hell anyway, but maybe i have less shame at how loud i was about it.

so many parts of this book crystallised for me the disconnection and unseenness i had been feeling increasingly — and i say crystallised like the feelings inside me were swirling and dripping and then froze into themselves on the way down, a stalactite of teary realisations. in the past year since, i’ve learnt a lot about what it means to grow up, a big part of which being that sometimes the people you love and treasure the most grow into who they have to be and you have to let them even if it means that one day you wake up and feel you’re staring at a chasm between the two of you and have no idea how it got there.

last year near my birthday and a scant 4 days after meeting someone who would become deeply important to me, and who would eventually break my heart, i was writing about loneliness:

so many times loneliness made me scared of opening up again, but then that’s not entirely true is it? the idea of opening up/blossoming like a flower ready to let light on its face — it’s equal parts a balance of knowing what you want and what feels good opening up to, and not just recklessly opening up to all feeling. that took me such a long time to really swallow.

Sometimes you want to be made meat; I mean to surrender to the body, its hungers, its need for contact, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be served bloody or braised.

listen. did i really have to make that same mistake so many times — the one where i assumed i wanted attention no matter the form it took, the one where i took shaky performing steps on every first date and came away thinking to myself that wasn’t so bad he wasn’t a creep but discovering within the next few days that while he wasn’t a creep he was entirely boring and i never wanted him just wanted to be wanted so badly i could almost give anything to feel a mouth on mine or hands grabbing into my flesh — maybe i did maybe i didn’t. but i know it a little better now, this little inkling that i am allowed to decide that i don’t want someone (just because, not by anyone’s fault), and don’t have to be so desperate to make myself edible consumable palatable appetising just to feel like someone might be capable of wanting me. sometimes i wanted to be made meat (wanted someone to want to sink their teeth into me and find me delicious and salivate after me) but i am realising that doesn’t necessarily mean i want to be eaten by anyone any way they like. figuratively and metaphorically.

There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone else’s commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read. That winter. the piers took on a life of their own in my mind. I pored over all the accounts I could find, fascinated by the spaces, the recklessness of encounter, the freedom and creativity they permitted. They seemed like an ideal world for someone who was struggling with connection, in that they combined the possibilities of privacy, anonymity and personal expression with the ability to reach out, to find a body, to be touched, to have your doings seen.

laing wrote the book when she live(d?) in NYC, surrounded by one of the densest populations in the world but feeling adrift/hopelessly disconnected in a way that drove her to unpack loneliness until it lay around her examined and daunting yet peaceful all at once. i am growing into a sort of solitude i’ve not known before — i was always very good with being alone and loved my solitude but i understand it and me now more than before. isn’t that what we say after every year we grow into? but it’s true. this year’s loneliness feels more…assured. i am less afraid that if people stop seeing me i will stop being. less afraid that if i let people go they will never come back and i will always be bereft. still afraid to lose people (because how can i not be if i love and love and love so juicy!!!) but no longer the fear that paralyses me/makes me self sabotage/makes me blind to what’s right in front of me.

Or Nan herself in purple ankle boots and maroon socks, her pale legs bare, straddling her lover’s chest, his hands just grazing the edge of translucent black knickers. The loveliness of touch, the rush of contact, the high of simply embracing, like Bruce and French Chris on a towel scattered with stars on the beach at Fire Island.

something something when someone touches you it reaffirms the boundaries of your existence, the fact that you exist at all. it reassures you you are material, you exist in a way that is wanted — desire on a sliding scale from mild affection all the way up to irresistible. of course i am in love with the rush of being wanted against all odds. but why should that mean i’m not also in love with the smaller, more real-feeling, grounded parts of it all?

the slow equally-weighted, balanced motions of two people wanting to know more about each other, wanting to see and be seen, two people staring into a bay of city lights glinting off a river surface and breathing slow and measured, seven whole hours of pure precious magic on a first date. i’m not saying i’m in love because it’s far too early but just the beginnings of a clear connection already astound me with how different they can be. how healthy and whole i can feel when i don’t have to guess if or how much someone wants me around.

Peter was here. Peter was gone. How to configure the transition or translation, the monumental change? In the suddenly empty room he tried to speak to whatever spirit was hovering, perhaps afraid, but found himself unable to find the right words or make the needful gesture, saying at last helplessly, ‘I want some kind of grace.’

but i always cope unhealthily with loss by remembering parts of the pain quite dramatically. i don’t want to downplay or stuff my previously broken heart up like some badly taxidermied animal. the fact of the matter (inasmuch as i can call it fact — what i remember of it) is that someone i loved once and i wanted very desperately to love each other and for very many glittery moments we did and did it right. but consistency was never our best suit; so many flips and misses even when there were beautiful hits. i think i’ve really made peace with it, put the ghost of it to bed and acknowledged that we both craved intimacy and grace and love in ways we were then both unable to fully give. and i think i forgive it all and myself most importantly. i no longer have anything to prove and i no longer have (nor want to have) any shame about being difficult to love.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political, Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each other…what matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

last year as i turned 28 i was thinking about my heart, not knowing that very soon after i would be gifted that feeling of coming home in love again. and i was thinking about what it means to feel purely, without baggage, so that i am unclogged enough for all the love to float me. i was writing about what i’ve always wanted for me:

i give in to feeling. i give in to desire and the longing to be seen and then i give in to loneliness and that little sadness that i can sit with and be friends with and not spiral into it. i give in to myself, my needs the way that sometimes what makes me feel best is putting a little medicated oil on my tummy and lying on the floor in my pajamas. i give into my fat juicy heart and how hard i want to love and how much i want to know. i know i’ll be okay. in many ways i already am more than. so golden.