This city gets lonely sometimes

It's like the morning after a night of working flat out to hit a deadline: the alarm goes off, you force your eyes open, and deep down you think "if only I could sleep a little longer". Tired. The loneliness in the middle of this city is just like that kind of tiredness. The more you try to deny it, the more you realise it is stuck to you, and you have to live with it every day, every hour, in every moment and every thought.

The lonely people of this city have many ways of keeping that loneliness company. Some choose a corner of their own in a café, with cigarettes and coffee the colour of an old lover's brown eyes. Some like to wander the streets at dusk or in the dead of night, to feel themselves inside the noise and rush. Others prefer to rest in a corner of memory steeped in the very sad taste of some days that once broke off, drifting with a falling leaf that announces the season, or a flower blooming pink on a street corner for no one in particular.

There are so many lonely souls like that. They come and go quietly, do their things quietly, quietly take in colours that only they can see. It sounds like stray melancholy, but it isn't. It has a kind of pride to it, a self that chose this, without a trace of self-pity. And they wait: for the day they meet a soul on the same frequency, to see the future, to learn to treasure the happy days ahead. The thing is, life is like this, and people have to be like this, whether they want to or not. Sometimes we don't get what we want, and that isn't so bad. If everyone were pampered, wouldn't we all be spoiled? However far we evolve, we are still animals, and animals survive only by adapting to their environment. Even to loneliness, right?

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Tan, 17 October 2021
First published in Vietnamese on Phong is writing. English translation for this site.