This collection did not come about in reaction to the times we’re living in, though that can’t be excused as irrelevant. This collection grew as I ventured deeper into my new adulthood. I began to see a shift in my experience with loneliness — it no longer felt the same, or rather, I began to have trouble defining it, pinpointing its causes. When I was younger, loneliness felt concrete. I was lonely when I was alone; whether that meant being in literal solitude or being misunderstood, the feeling was defined by my relationship to others. As I got older, I began to experience loneliness as a feeling defined by my relationship to self. I was lonely when I felt far from myself. The old definition was still there, but this new experience was often more overwhelming in its lack of concreteness. Consciously or subconsciously, that was when I began to search for myself.

 

I found that I was driven to go deeper within myself than I had ever gone before. I was searching for this person I thought I knew, but who I realized I had only gotten glimpses of. I began to see how the experience of finding oneself — or at least hunting for oneself — is preceded by the experience of losing oneself, the experience of loneliness. During this time, I read Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I started to understand what it was the heart was hunting for and why it had to be alone to find it. 

 

The stories in my collection reflect this notion. They do not suggest that there is something necessarily productive about loneliness; they suggest, rather, that there is something inevitable, something universal about it, and they work to uncover the ways loneliness can bring us closer to ourselves and to others. They address how heavy the weight of loneliness is, how frightening it can be, and how far we’ll run to get away from it. In the spirit of Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, my stories confront the inner-workings of loneliness as well as the various forms it takes on — the kind of loneliness that comes when you’ve lost something, when you’re far from home, when you’re pretending to be someone you’re not.

 

We often mistake loneliness for other feelings: anger, injustice, deference, hatred, desire, lust. The risk of this misidentification is that our reactions to these other emotions often further isolate us and make it difficult to do the work loneliness asks us to do. For example, we like to describe our current world as more isolated and disconnected than ever before. We always emphasize the irony with this: we live in the digital age of connection. If, however, we go by my earlier definition of loneliness — distance from oneself — then it’s not surprising that a world in which we build artificial profiles, brand and sell ourselves, catfish, and hide behind usernames and avatars is a lonely world. We are more artificially connected than we’ve ever been, so we are callous to the usual signs and feelings of loneliness. We aren’t motivated to hunt for ourselves. We’ve put a Band-Aid over our heart and have left it living in abandonment.

 

These stories also explore the way loneliness spans generations. The cultural, social, and technological leaps made between eras have grown exponentially wider. Simultaneously, intergenerational childrearing has fallen away, neighbors have locked their doors, and community programs have dissipated. Young folks have become more impatient with old folks, and, in turn, old folks are quicker to close themselves off to us. We both are plagued by the same loneliness, yet instead of reaching out to each other, we have left each other stranded in our own worlds.

 

This collection takes place in the gap between those worlds: the strange, vast place where loneliness sends us wandering. The stories follow a few lone hunters into this seemingly empty desert and capture what happens when they bump into each other — how they team up and walk out together or, at least, send each other in new directions. Some of the stories focus on the experience of being out there when you can’t seem to run into anyone — the hallucinatory mirages, the thirst, the echoes, the mirrors of dust that send harsh reflections back at you.

 

These stories are about the pieces of ourselves we find buried in the sand — how hard we’ll work to dig them up, the lengths we’ll go to hold on to them, the strangers we’ll learn to trust as they hunt alongside of us. In the end, the journey — the lonely hunt — reveals itself to be an experience of solidarity as opposed to solitude.