Harry Nilsson’s song “One,” most famously covered in two distinct but perfect recordings by Three Dog Night and Aimee Mann (the latter used for the title sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia) is a song that has been in my head for several months now and I couldn’t quite figure out why. It is not simply that it is an earworm. It is not that I am a die-hard Nilsson fan (especially given his awful songs for Robert Altman’s Popeye). I think it might have to do with the fact that loneliness has naturally become one of the more prominent themes of my writing life. As far back as my first one-act play, betrayal and deceit in relationships has been a standard theme and the resulting, crushing solitude a given in plot points and the subject of many poems, yet I’ve refrained from dealing with it in essay form until now.
Most of my life I have lived with people, but the essential loneliness of life stays with me. It’s perfectly captured in a song from Stephen Sondheim’s musical about marriage, Company. Multiple husbands answer Robert’s question, “Are you ever sorry you got married?” One of the lyrical replies is, “You hold her thinking, 'I’m not alone.';/You’re still alone.” Which is so horribly, horribly true. I have never been married, but I have observed marriages my entire life and there is still, at the core of them, two lonely people who have found each other but still know, at any time, their connection is ephemeral, can be taken away at any moment or could be a complete sham.
There is a part of me that craves solitude and a part that detests it. As a baby, there was a 24-hour period where I screamed bloody murder. My mother gave me everything she could to satisfy me—food, toys, diaper changes, etc. Finally, throwing her hands up, she put me in my crib and shut the door. Within seconds, my screaming stopped and I was happily playing by myself, swatting at whatever contraption hung above me. I think that’s a very large part of who I am and, given that writing is a solitary profession, it is a useful aspect of my life. Yet, there are times when I hunger for connections which have almost always been out of reach. However, in the relationships I’ve had, I come back to Nilsson’s song: “Two can be as bad as one./It’s the loneliest number since the number one.” That’s the line that really troubles me because, like Sondheim’s, it has great truth and truth can be hard on the soul.
Until fourth grade, girls were always my best friends. As soon as I started seeing them in a romantical way, I have had almost zero close friends who are women except for wives of friends and, even then, we don’t tend to be as close as I to their male counterparts. I’m not entirely sure the reason for this phenomenon. It is just another fact of who I am. My subsequent history with women has been muddled, to be sure. My first kiss was one given out of self-pity. The giving party cared about me because I was vulnerable; she was older and wiser. It was a “gosh-that’s-so-cute-of-him-kiss.” It meant something, just not what I’d intended. My first girlfriend was another older woman (eighth grade when I was in seventh) and there was virtually no connection at all except many boring phone calls, though I am glad she introduced me to the overlooked romantic comedy Only You with Robert Downey, Jr. and Marisa Tomei.
My high school experience was uncommon, of course, attending a performing arts school. I had no time for interpersonal relationships much. I was too focused on my burgeoning acting career. Nevertheless, there were two relationships of note. I had one public girlfriend and one secret one (for reasons I shan’t discuss at this time). Both were fellow actresses. Neither were such negative experiences as to scar my life or anything, but they had tremendous highs and treacherous lows particularly with the secret one. Those were the first days I experienced what I now know is depression.
My first real relationship was in college. It was the longest lasting, clocking in at two and a half years and, though I posture sometimes, the break up was something I never quite got over. We will call her Dawn. We will call her "replacement" Malia. I’ve never told this story in anything but allegorical ways (see my play The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me, originally produced under the title And They Heard the Thunder of Angels), so bear with me.
Dawn and I met acting in a workshop of an original musical. I was much too embarrassed to say anything to her up front, but as my freshman year was concluding, I called her dorm number and left a voicemail expressing how much I had enjoyed working with her. I never received a call back. Summer came and my determination to have someone nagged at me quite a bit. A friend who was soon to enlist in the Air Force drove me to Vermont for my sophomore year. He, my roommate, and I were having a discussion. I would either pursue Dawn or another person. We all chose Dawn. Dawn was receptive. We officially began dating on the first anniversary of 9/11 and decided that date didn’t have to mean doom for all time. I bought her a bouquet of roses that lasted longer than any other flowers I’ve ever bought and everything seemed so perfect in the beginning.
To everyone else, we were inseparable and insufferable—had no sense of our PDA bothering others. We all just figured everyone else was jaded, wrong, and jealous. Still, with all the meetings of families in the burgeoning relationship, something nagged at me in the back of my mind. She was Jewish and I was a committed Christian. It seems such a ridiculous thing now, but I worried about this as far as the future was concerned—raising children, etc. She had interest in Christianity because I had interest in it and, during our time together, we visited probably over forty different churches in an attempt to find something we both liked.
She stayed in the little college town after she graduated so we could remain together. Two years later, I was nearing my graduation and something had grown stale between us that we were not acknowledging. We were together and alone, isolated from everyone else in an apartment off-campus (really the former slave quarters of a historic home) and isolated from each other in our minds. I began regretting (stupidly) that I had not dated more people during my college experience and the seven-year itch came five years too early.
I had met Malia in my first year. We were the same age and the same religion. We had crushes on each other, but nothing ever materialized…until Dawn took a trip to DC in March of 2005 and Malia and I found each other growing close. To be clear, nothing was ever consummated—even in the resulting relationship we had—but I was cheating in my mind already, so I held the burden of being the cheater once we connected.
The immediate feeling was guilt. I could not truly enjoy whatever was happening with Malia because I knew Dawn had sacrificed two years of her life and career for me, had been loyal and faithful and, even if our relationship had become a bore (which we didn’t admit until after it was over), it was as if the same person were being rent in two. I also fully expected Malia to be as good and as understanding and as warm and as helpful and as loving as Dawn. This was not to be the case. The deal I made with the Devil resulted in a halted existence. In a sense, I have felt my life ended there till this day. The rest feels like something of a non-existence.
It was the summer of 2005. Dawn and I had said goodbye as she took up with someone twenty years her senior and I was already missing what we had (even made a couple of attempts at getting her back a year later). Two could clearly be as bad as one. By the fall of that year, I was without money and stuck in Alabama because Malia told me not to come to the new life she promised me. My life was in boxes scattered about the living room, ready to move. I had my car on a vehicle to transport it to Oregon. I had a non-refundable plane ticket. Somehow, my family intervened and I was able to at least get back the non-refundable things, but a hate set up in my heart that was astonishing. Was I blaming her or myself? Who’s to say?
These two relationships impacted my life in a way that was not clear in some ways until now.
Which is worse? One or two? In my experience, both. One is most certainly the loneliest, two a close second. Do I still hold out hope there is someone for me? Not in this day and age. One can barely tell who is male or female anymore, after all. I’m too old to find someone my age to deliver children safely. I’m too young to give up entirely or, at least, that's what they tell me.
Perhaps, one day, I will be delivered from this trauma, but it has held me a mental prisoner for so long, I can't say that I will ever be free from the guilt and the image of a life I could have had and never will.
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