Alone, As Ever Before?

Sylvie Daley

Personal Essay

She was the best one I should never have seen.

I was an eccentric type - I’d wear orange pants and speak to people using unnecessarily flowery and archaic english solely for the purpose of confusing my audience and scaring them away. (I myself was always intimidated by the attention that my eccentricity attracted.) I would carry a notebook around with me everywhere, creating careful accounts of every occurrence: every interaction I witnessed; every eavesdropped conversation. I stood alone wherever I went, faced everything on my own. I found solace and solitude hiding in the shadows, silently watching the world pass by. I was a carefree nine year old, and so far as I was concerned I belonged no particular place and mattered particularly to no person. And not a single person or place mattered to me. I was transient.

I couldn’t say exactly when it was she entered my world, but she had begun to follow me on my expeditions, and failed to be intimidated by my superfluous use of sophisticated language. In fact, she very easily kept up with it and even employed abstruse words in her own communication. She began to tag along with me and became like a shadow in many respects. Wherever I was, she’d be lurking not far away. Then I’d find her lurking in my corners - she always managed to take all the best places for hiding before I could get to them. I had always known her face, but she was the silent, nameless type whose quiet presence had become a familiar aspect of the atmosphere; so much so that I was conditioned to not put much thought into her existence. Perhaps this accounts for why I only gradually developed an awareness that she was always at my side. She had seemed just a ghostly ever-presence until the day she at last spoke to me.

She had pulled me and my notebook out of the bushes that defined the boundaries of the school playground, and demanded that I give her my time. And on a sunny day I’ll talk to anyone, so I did, and we instantly became friends. We both considered ourselves outcasts in the same self-inflicted exile. We rejected the same aspects of the faceless modern culture we’d been brought up into. The only difference between us was this: I had witnessed the capabilities of the

Society’s masquerade - I had seen it lure and capture its pawns. I had seen it devour entire crops and refuse to spit out the seeds. I had seen it catch each of my erstwhile contemporaries and companions on its tongue and swallow them whole. Whereas she resented what was already hiding behind the facade, for she had never witnessed her promising comrade sacrifice their true self to pledge membership into a group which the two of us subsequently began to refer to as “Them”.

Instead of idolizing Them, we created new worlds of our own. We would escape to these worlds when the real one seemed either unfair or understimulating. We were lucky: when everyone around us had long ago sacrificed their own intellect and imagination, ours were still intact. In our world, we got to have a unique experience in a culture all of our own creation.

It was a society which was not only created with a great deal of care, but one that valued creativity and knowledge - virtues we found lacking in the other one we were conditioned to. Even the language we made up for the purpose of having a world all to ourselves was extensive and articulate, and where there was a gap in our language we could easily reach for a word that none of our peers who claimed to “speak English” could understand anyhow.

The “worlds” we created started off quite primitive. They went from building forts in the solitude of the deep woods, pretending all of the birds and plants were strange and exotic, to developing specific ceremonies and rituals. We gradually invented detailed stories and elaborate histories to complement our invisible worlds. But tragedy and disaster eventually rocked our small world of Pretend. Our peers taunted us for being so delusional, and insisted we face reality. But the harsh reality we’d encountered in our own imaginary Wonderland scarred us with early life lessons about the line between Good and Evil, and friendship versus betrayal. Our Neverland had cannibalized itself to death.

As we grew older, our prized imaginations began to dwindle, and so we were forced to abandon our corrupt worlds where we had once taken refuge. And yet we were still not ready to sacrifice our childhoods as everyone around us had long ago, so we sought more practical, while still juvenile activities to pursue. There had been a time when we were especially intrigued by the book “Harriett the Spy,” so now we began to call our practice of carrying notebooks and hiding in dark shadows “spying”. This eventually evolved to dressing in dark clothes, wearing fake disguise glasses, and climbing up in the rafters of my house, aiming to remain patiently silent and inconspicuous for as long as we conceivably could. The painstakingly slow-paced activity actually wasn’t at all unnatural to us, and we took a certain comfort in watching particular people from a distance. Like with our previous enthusiasm, we learned quite a bit about different people and lifestyles, and human nature, and from observation it became evident that our peers who had once insisted we should face reality seemed to have an even slighter grasp on reality themselves!

I shall digress briefly to explain in simple terms that by no means did we consider ourselves “best friends”. She had better friends than me by comparison, and I had no one I could have compared her to, had I felt so compelled. But by then I had realized that we were ideally suited for each other as far as companionship went.

But this was also the time when she began to focus exclusively on the new conviction that she was ideally suited for life as a member of the uniform crowd which she before had always joined me in distantly making fun of. I suppose that at that point I was aware of what was to come, and in subsequent years, as anticipated, we found ourselves with less and less occasion to speak with each other, and later with even fewer occasions to acknowledge the other’s existence when we

happened to collide in the hallway at school. I was a bit disappointed that we had lost touch with the distant past. But when I found that I could no longer tell her apart from the rest of the crowd (as far as ensemble goes, in both clothing and face-painting), I was suddenly highly demoralized by the revelation. But by no means was I surprised by it. Based on my own experience with similar people in the past, I knew right at the start that it was inevitable that she would wind up one of Them eventually. Perhaps I had held on to it too hard, feeling that I had at last found someone whom I could count on; someone who wouldn’t turn into everybody else in the end. Anyone can be mislead, I suppose, but although she denied it, she was truly giving in to beauty. It seemed like a loss of innocence, in a way.

There was a time when the two of us were on our own team ? against the rest of the world, against the evils of society. We fought the world, and said we would never wind up like everybody else. We would never turn into Them.

...But all things must pass, and although she’s now graduated to a higher prestige as a part of what can only be described as the “cool” crowd, I still carry a notebook. I still hide in the dark corners, but nowadays I watch the crowds with a fixation: I watch over my old friend like a constant shadow, though she has left me alone in my ways.

Perhaps it is the case that nobody exists just as they might seem to everyone else- that everyone exists as an entirely different person in somebody else’s imagination. Maybe she was merely a product of mine. But even if she did at one time provoke an image in my mind of some faithful companion whom I could forever depend upon to remain the same, that image has faded, and she no longer exists. I can only wonder if I still exist somewhere in a dark corner in her mind. I?m probably in a cardboard box collecting dust at the moment - forgotten, just as though she’d never seen me to begin with. I should never have seen her. I shouldn’t ever have been subject to her greatness, for now I’ve once again found myself alone, as ever before.