Call me a misanthrope, an introvert, whatever. The fact is, I always thought I preferred being alone.
I had a couple of friends. Well, mainly acquaintances. People I worked with. People I lived near. Family.
But I had tried doing the companionship thing, and it never seemed to be for me. I had a girlfriend for two years, but she left me because I rarely wanted to go out with her friends, preferring to stay home, just the two of us. The feeling that was most prominent after she left was relief.
I also tried hanging out with a group of people I met online. As in, hanging out with them in the real world. I did this because my ex-girlfriend told me I needed to get out more, to meet people, to come out of my shell.
I realized after hanging out with them that I liked my shell better. Again, it's not that I didn't like them. I'm just not a hang-out kind of person. I'm not an Asperger's patient or anything. I can have conversations, I can be friendly. I've stopped to help strangers on the side of the road who were having car trouble. I've helped people move who I barely knew. I've donated blood just because I could. I've volunteered at a homeless shelter. It's just a matter of preferring to stay in on a Friday night with a good book, when having a group of friends would mean I'd feel obligated to go out instead.
I say all that to say that the loneliest I'd ever felt was when I was in a crowd of people, and I truly believed that the best feeling ever was the feeling of being alone.
That is, until this morning.
I woke up, and the first thing I noticed was that the power was out. I live in an older building just south of downtown. The kind of place where the carpet in the halls is stained all over with god-knows-what, the paint on the walls is chipped and peeling, in many places the ceiling is just a collection of exposed pipes, the elevators make odd noises like they're straining on even the lightest load, and the whole place carries the heady bouquet of booze, cigarettes and weed. The power's gone out before. The last time it happened, it didn't come back on for two days. I had just gone grocery shopping the day before. Sucks having to throw out stuff you just bought.
So, when I woke, my first feeling was irritation. "They had better not take forever getting it back on this time," I muttered. Now, where you live, the power probably mostly goes out only after a storm, fire or heavy snowfall. In my building, with wiring that was probably installed during the Ford administration and hadn't really been upgraded since, the power could go out at any time of the year, and needed no outside catalyst to do so. So it never crossed my mind to wonder why, on a wet-but-not-stormy day in April, the power would go out like this.
I opened all my windows for light, but it didn't help much, as it was pretty grey outside. The weather had been cloudy all week, with a few light showers, and even with my largest window open, I still couldn't see much in my house, and my bathroom, which had no windows, was darker than a crypt.
My alarm clock was dead, of course, so I checked the time on my phone. I swore and leaped into the shower, not caring that the water was ice cold, and that I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Even if I walked out the door this very minute, I was going to be an hour late for work. I hate being late. I usually try to be at least fifteen minutes early. It's a weird side-effect of introverts that we're usually pretty anal retentive about being on time.
Throwing on some clothes, I bolted out the door, headed for the elevator. Mid-stride, I turned for the stairs, remembering almost too late that no power of course meant no elevator.
Now, this is probably when I first felt it; that sense of unease. I did my best to ignore it, because I wasn't a child anymore, and feelings like that are just your mind running away on you. But it was hard to ignore, and not just because of the total darkness of the stairwell. It was because I realized at that point that I had not seen another human being that entire morning.
