Reaching Through Glass
An essay by Spike Humer
On loneliness as a matter not of who is near us, but of which way we are facing.
6 min readI have been lonely in rooms full of people who loved me.
That is the version worth talking about. Not the loneliness of the empty house, which at least makes sense — no one is there, so no one is there. The other kind. The kind that sits across the table from someone who would do anything for you and feels, anyway, like the last person alive.
For most of my life I thought that loneliness was a measurement of distance between me and other people. I have come to think it was a measurement of a different distance entirely.
The reaching started early and I was good at it.
I could find what a person needed and become it. I could read a room and adjust until I fit it. In love this looked like devotion, and some of it was, but underneath the devotion was a hunger so old I never questioned it. I was reaching for something. I believed it was on the other side of the person in front of me. If I performed well enough, gave enough, became enough, the thing would finally cross the distance and reach me back.
It never quite did.
There would be a moment — early, exhilarating — when it felt close enough to touch. And then the moment would pass, the way moments do, and the hunger would return exactly as it had been, as if nothing had been fed at all. I would reach again. I spent decades this way, across more relationships than I will name, certain that the next reach was the one that would land.
What I could not see was that I was reaching for something I could not reach. Not because the people were withholding it. Because it was never out there to be reached.
I want to be precise about what the hunger actually was, because for years I had it wrong.
I thought it was a hunger for love. It wasn’t. Or it was, but love was only the name I gave it. Underneath, when it was at its worst, the feeling was simpler and stranger than love. I felt untethered. I felt that if no one reached back — if the attention stopped, if the room turned away — I would begin to shrink and fade and float off, lighter and lighter, until there was no more of me.
That is what the reaching was for. Not to be adored. To be held in existence. To be kept real by someone else’s looking.
You cannot ask a person to do that. No one can do it. It is not a failure of love that the people I reached for could not keep me tethered to myself. It was never theirs to do. I was standing at a window my whole life, reaching through the glass for someone outside to hold me here, and the whole time the thing that could hold me was behind me, in the room, unreached, because I never turned around.
That was the error. Not who I was reaching toward. Which way I was facing.
I learned it, when I finally learned it, in the worst possible place for it to be comforting.
It came inside a disregard. Something I had done — something that mattered to me, that I wanted seen — went unacknowledged by the person I most wanted to see it. The old machinery started up at once. The hurt, the proof of my smallness, the familiar slide toward floating off.
And then it simply stopped.
I waited for the disappearing and it did not come. The attention I had spent my life begging for was not there, the room had turned away exactly as I had always feared, and I did not shrink, and I did not fade. I stood in the empty place where the hunger used to live and found that the place could be empty and I could still be here.
It was not triumph. It was almost the opposite — a kind of quiet, ambivalent freedom, the strange calm of discovering that a thing you were sure would kill you was something you could survive. I did not need the acknowledgment. Not because I had risen above needing it. Because the need had been pointed at the wrong horizon all along, and for one moment I felt the tether hold from the inside, where it had been the whole time.
I want to be honest about what that moment was and was not.
It was not a cure. The hunger is not gone. It still arrives — older than I am, fluent, certain, reaching for the window out of fifty years of habit. I feel it the way you feel weather. What changed is not that it left. What changed is that I can see it now. I can watch it reach and know what it is reaching for and know that the thing it wants is not out there.
That seeing is not nothing. It is, in fact, most of what I have. The reaching no longer runs me, because I can tell when I am doing it. The loneliness, when it comes, is no longer evidence that someone has failed me. It is information. It tells me I have turned back toward the window. It tells me where I am not looking.
So I no longer think loneliness is the absence of other people.
I think it is the distance between where we are looking and where we actually are. You can close every other distance — fill the room, marry the love, gather the friends — and that one stays open, because it was never a distance other people could cross. It closes from one side only, and from the inside, and most of us spend our lives with our backs to the only door that opens.
I am not all the way turned around. I doubt I will be. But I know now which way the door is, which is more than I knew for sixty years of reaching through glass.
The people I reached for were never the answer. They were never supposed to be. They were good people, most of them, doing what people can do, which is to stand near us and be loved. They could not keep me real. No one could. That was always going to be my work, in the room I kept refusing to turn around and enter.
I am in it now, more often than I used to be. It is quieter than I expected. There is no one here to keep me tethered.
I have not floated away.
—sh