Feeling Alone When Someone’s Right Next to You
A short story about loneliness and the choice to move on
Photo by Nicole Wolf on Unsplash
Have you ever felt alone when you’re sitting right next to someone? I’m a stay-at-home mom. I feel lonely all the time, despite never being alone. I was thinking about that when I wrote this short story about two girls on the cusp of high school graduation.
Where do I sign?
“What do you think it looks like?” I ask Jackie. The double string quartet playing my song fades away and is replaced by abrupt jabs from a synth organ at the beginning of hers. It’s the last Friday before graduation and we’re in Jackie’s room listening to our shared playlist.
I feel homesick for some reason even though Jackie’s room is literally my second home. I’m snuggled in Jackie’s heavenly gray down feather nest of a bed, flipping through her yearbook, which has already been signed by half the school. The notes, all written with the same silver gel pen, have transformed the inky blue endpapers into a galaxy of glittering goodbyes. I turn to page 17, where our senior photos appear side-by-side, Jaqueline Miller and Trinity Moffatt, just like we’ve been IRL without question since the beginning of time.
“What does what look like?” Jackie asks. Sitting on her perch at the glossy white IKEA desk on the other side of the room, she stoppers the bottle of flat white polish she’s using to paint her toenails and swipes at her phone to turn up her song. I can feel my only filling, a souvenir from our seventh-grade design-your-own-fro-yo phase, vibrating as the heavy bass rumbles through the speaker on the nightstand.
“The face. What do you think it looks like?” I ask.
“Whose face?” Jackie shrugs her shoulders along with the thrumming baseline. I originally accused her of violating our one-for-one rule with this song because if you can somehow make it through the whole thing without running to the bathroom to puke it sounds like three different songs.
We used to have a rule that every song on our BadAssBitches playlist be performed by or written about a badass bitch, but our qualifications for badassery diverged so much over the life of the playlist that by senior year we needed to send every potential new song to a committee for approval. It was Jackie’s idea that this guy Nick from our Spanish class be appointed as the BABs playlist committee, and it was also Jackie’s idea that he should take me to the winter formal.
When Nick and I became official or whatever, he resigned from the committee due to a conflict of interest, and Jackie finally agreed we could drop the badass rule. Which brings me back to my song, which was neither performed by, nor written about, a badass bitch.
“Eleanor Rigby,” I say. “The face she keeps in the jar by the door. What do you think it looks like?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds super creepy.”
“My song that just ended. Eleanor Rigby. It’s The Beatles. The song is about lonely people, and the lyrics say Eleanor wears a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. I can’t believe you don’t know the words by now.”
She’s texting someone, probably Nick, so she doesn’t answer me immediately. The two of them act like besties now that they both got their acceptance letters from Penn State. A normal person would probably get jealous that her boyfriend texts another girl, even if the girl is her best friend who insisted you two would be perfect for each other in the first place, but honestly, I’ve never cared that much about it. I have fun making out with Nick every now and then, if we’re ever actually alone, so I feel like there’s at least some useful purpose to our relationship.
I can’t say I’ve thought much about what’s going to happen with us when Nick goes to Penn State and I’m left at home commuting to MontCo. He didn’t even ask to sign my yearbook yet, but I can see he already signed Jackie’s, right in the middle of the inside front cover. All the other messages are pieced around his like a jigsaw puzzle. Almost like his was the first.
“Jack,
I’ll drive if you bring the Funyuns.
Your chauffeur, Nickie”
Another one of Jackie’s jokes I don’t get to be inside. I run my index finger over Nick’s signature. The sweat from my palm smears the shimmery ink into an illegible blob.
“To be honest, Trin, I kind of zone out when that song comes on,” Jackie says. “You’re all about the lyrics, and I’m all about the rhythm. I can’t get into your songs if they don’t have a beat.”
She’s right. Eleanor Rigby doesn’t have a bassline. There is no beat. It’s just strings and Paul’s voice and a story about loneliness. And as I run my fingers over the shimmering jigsaw of uneven chicken scratch and swooping cursive covering the pages of Jackie’s yearbook, a tiny universe of remember whens and I’ll miss yous I’ll never be inside, it’s obvious to me why Jackie doesn’t get it.
Thirty-seven. That’s how many times her lightly freckled face appears in the yearbook. Thirty-seven times as many appearances as my oddly similar lightly freckled face that has always caused waitresses and bus drivers and guys on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore to ask us if we’re sisters. Jackie doesn’t need the lyrics, she’s always been able to go with the rhythm.
“I just always wonder why Eleanor is so lonely,” I say, more to myself than to Jackie. “And I like to imagine what kind of face she would choose to wear that isn’t her own.”
Jackie’s phone pings with a new text, which she responds to while she’s talking to me because she has an unbelievable ability to bullshit her way through several things at once and somehow still manage to seem like she’s only paying attention to you. A Jackie sleight of hand I’ve fallen for my whole life, apparently.
“Maybe Elaine is lonely because she dropped her phone in the toilet at a party on Saturday night and has to wait an extra hour for the Apple store to open because now it’s Sunday morning and the stupid mall opens late. She shouldn’t have kept her phone in her jean’s pocket. I’ve always said leggings are the way to go. See. Jeans lead to loneliness. I’m adding that to my list of reasons not to wear those oppressive leg prisons ever again.”
And just like that her neck is bent down over her phone again as if she didn’t just somehow turn a legit conversation about one of my favorite songs into another opportunity to explain why she is the ultimate authority on all things life.
“I don’t think she has a party to go to,” I say.
“There’s always a party to go to, Trin. Elaine just needs to look harder.” She finishes her text and pokes at one of her toes to test if the polish is dry. “Why are we talking about this? It’s so depressing. What’s Nick doing tonight?” She always asks me what Nick’s doing tonight when she already damn well knows what he’s doing tonight before I ever do.
“Eleanor. Her name is Eleanor.”
“Ok, sorry. Eleanor. I don’t understand what’s with you today. I’m going to text Nick to see if he’s having people over. It’s Senior Week, we should be making memories.”
Her song without an end is still playing, and she turns the volume up a notch. The vibration from the speaker rattles a whitewashed picture frame on her desk until it falls over onto its face with a crack. It’s the photo of us from winter formal, Jackie’s wearing a genuine smile and I’m wearing the smile I know I’m supposed to wear at a high school dance. Jackie doesn’t even notice that it fell, and I don’t make a move to pick it up.
“Hey, bitch, sign my yearbook,” Jackie says when her song ends. She throws the silver gel pen at me. I uncap the pen and look for a swatch of black large enough to contain all the things I’ve been meaning to say to her. But there’s no space left for me. So on the middle of the inside cover, right next to Nick’s signature, I sign the name Eleanor in perfect, elegant letters. Before the ink has a chance to dry, I smear it with my thumb and snap the cover shut.
“You can’t be done already,” Jackie says.
“No, I’m not,” I say, although something in my head tells me I am.