Loneliness is strange because people always confuse it with being alone.

You can be alone without feeling lonely.
You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely abandoned.

I think my loneliness comes from the fact that I don’t really have anyone.

Not fully.

No childhood friends. No lifelong circle. No person that has known me through every version of myself. Most of my friendships expire after a year or two, like milk left too long in the fridge. Eventually people drift away, or I do. Sometimes nothing even happens. One day you just realize you would never call each other in an emergency.

I started feeling lonely in middle school. I had friends technically, but they never felt real enough to hold onto. Then I moved to Washington my freshman year of high school and things got quieter.

Different town. Different culture. Different people.
Everyone already belonged to each other.

Then the pandemic happened and whatever chance there was to connect with people disappeared behind screens and masks and online classes. By junior year everyone was fighting each other or pretending to be someone else. Everyone had some weird performance going on. Senior year barely even felt like school anymore. Running Start was mostly online, and I stopped knowing people altogether.

I almost didn’t go to graduation.

Not because I was nervous. I just couldn’t think of a reason to be there. There wasn’t anyone I wanted to celebrate with. The only reason I walked was because my mom flew up from California to watch me cross the stage. So I did it for her.

Then I moved to the city at eighteen and somehow things became even lonelier.

Most of my family still lives in California. I don’t really connect with people in my nursing program. I go to class, go home, repeat it again. Sometimes days pass where the only real conversation I have is with my boyfriend.

Loneliness changes the way your brain works after a while.

You start inventing versions of your life in your head. Imaginary friendships. Imaginary conversations. Future memories that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes I think lonely people live partially in fantasy because reality feels too empty to sit in all the time.

And eventually the loneliness becomes heavy enough that you start wondering how much of suicide is actually about dying and how much of it is about not wanting to carry your own existence alone anymore.

Last quarter, two people I knew were driving to class when they watched a girl jump off Deception Pass Bridge.

Around one hundred and eighty feet down into violent water.

No boats go under it. The current is too dangerous. People drown there constantly.

They were late to class that morning because they watched someone disappear.

Sometimes I think about that girl even though I never saw her.

Sometimes I feel like her.

Sometimes I think about jumping too. Maybe because bridges make things feel simple. Maybe because drowning sounds softer than other endings. I don’t know.

What scares me more is that when I imagine dying, I don’t really think about myself. I think about my boyfriend. My parents. The people who would have to carry it afterward.

That feels worse than death itself.

And maybe that’s the strangest part about loneliness, the fact that even when you feel completely alone, your absence would still leave a hole in other people’s lives.