Rich, Tall, Loneliness
Collage by Hafsah Bibi and Libbe Phan
Jorhat is a sweet town in the hilly areas of Assam, India. I saw and was able to believe in the heart of nature here, for the first time. The sun and the rain, flora, and fauna and their knots all spanned across, and you see fish-sellers set up shop on the side of the roads with candles on the edges, some patient train roads, dwarwish goats and dogs, and lots of bamboo. Living there, cats started showing up at our house—hoarders of love—sitting amongst lots of trees, cheerful neighbors, and my father’s own modest plants.
I lived there with my family for about five months. Frankly, little longing for the city where I lived, miles away, remained. I realized personally what nature can do, all by itself, though other things added to it.
We visited in the fall, and it was cool with tints of chill. Almost only single-story buildings sat cozily. It took a while to get used to my humidity-accustomed skin. In around a week or two I’d (ironically) warmed up to it. My house had a whole lot of grass around it, along with trees, flowers, butterflies, rocks, and there’s scarcely another way to put it: they were friends and comforters that found their way to my head. Eventually, they made everything there more willing, prepared, and without tension; something lifeless was left behind in the dim walls of our house in the city, and this was a whole other season that the city would rarely if ever see.
There was an inexplicable divinity in the hold of the greenery and the wide sky and the different birds that would reveal themselves gradually. Inches away from the earth, from the grass, and from bicycle tracks like honest guides—it was contentment. The essence is something that now may be seen as trite: “Nature is healing”, but it’s the essence nonetheless, of a vital connection to the earth. This was improved upon by warm neighbors, often out and about, darting by us and around each other. They gave us food, too, in homely boxes; crumbs like the incense of love. It was the harmony with people and its gentle grip that comforted me (people are lovely and worth making promises to).
The casual acts of reaching out, words of greeting, all were kind and almost tangent. They moved me in some uplifting way. I also picked up cycling there, feeling my foot hit the pedals and the wind slipping past my arms and neck somehow felt like an expression of something innate. The intimacy of earth, people, wind, green, untouched light was a place I’d never seemed to have been to—one of grounding comfort.
I’d stayed there for a good half-year, but the time came to an end and I had to return to my city. I could have felt a precious hope in me drain out; just imagining my house up on the fourth floor was damning. But I took the last days anyhow—what I could, gladly, not unregretfully.
In the city, all of the vividity fell down, and the openness seemed to have been tied up into nothing. The city’s true heart can be hard to find. People walking past only showed a cemented, passive indifference—alienated from the kind faces I greeted in the afternoons in Jorhat.
The city is too high, too far from the ground and hope. It builds upwards instead of holding the earth. It’s too heavy—it suffocates. I didn’t go anywhere that wasn’t school most of the time. The tree by our window grew leaves in front of us, but strangely—I could not realize it. The hold of nature had now started to go cold on me. I could not cycle the same, nor measure the sky with all the high-rise buildings and traffic lights and cars. I am lucky enough to have friends in the city that turn the fear down, which is something that is so often lost to people.
In the city, there was only a terrible quietness like a pile of clothing too hot to touch. Such was the desolation of having a corner in the city—a dead end of crowding faces and glass.
I realize how widespread this feeling of isolation is—from talks with friends, from people speaking of it online, and also because it is not short of natural given that humans are a part of nature, not a separate entity. A lot of this ache is because we have left our innate roots so far below, under layers of concrete and hunger not only for food. In fact, The Preservation Institute mentions that while walking through a traditional urban neighborhood, with buildings five or six stories high, people are closer and you can see personalizing details such as flower pots in windows that can be symbols of connection. But with a high-rise neighborhood, such quirks are lost, and signs of humanity recede. With this, losing sight of hope comes too easy in cities, and loneliness, anxiety, and paranoia follow. Capitalism—in the sense of incessant opportunism, power-hunger, mechanization—can be listed as one of the chief causes of making the world a place where such hostile loneliness is this common. People have gone from joyfully turning around each other to turning around walls and stairs, both figuratively and literally. People are always entering and leaving, imagining a city often conjures up an overwhelming liminal space. How do you build connections when people are always leaving? Inconsistency stirs up hopelessness, and makes one feel lost and lonesome.
On top of this, the little interaction is tainted with superficial politeness with no intention of even genuine kindness. There is little space for intimacy, understanding or even spontaneity—you feel rooted in desolation. Humanity thrives on connection, is it any surprise? Is it any surprise that cities can cause people to feel haunted by living people and their eyes, caught in a nervous coldness?
In the end, cities are spent in niceties, business, opportunities, material wealth, and shine. There is no space for an unpolished human experience, the transient nature makes it impossible. The real earth is now turning into a luxury when it was supposed to be the very foundation of human life; it has been buried too far down and in. People can scarcely witness the true landscape of nature’s call, its strength, and welcome breath. “[A]nyway it’s just the same old story, a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive,” Mary Oliver wrote. It would be a gift to wind around each other with this consideration, for ourselves and each other, for the world, and to “swim through the fires to stay in this world” make it a better place for the plants and the animals, the true listeners, and weave with and for each other—taking a moment to meet eyes beneath the sun reaching through the trees
