Who

Flipping through some random YouTube shorts the other day, I came across an autism activist whose name, I think, is something like Kaelynn. In one of the videos, she talks about two different kinds of loneliness: the more obvious sort, where you have no one to love, and then a less common one, the one where no one loves you. The first, she says, you experience “because you have no one” and the second “because you are no one’s someone.” She further explains that the second is “a tough place to be, knowing you’ve got something specific and valuable to offer but no one need’s it from you.” The short really struck me, partly because Kaelynn is superb (“Shit just sucks sometimes, you know?”), but mostly because that second idea isn’t one I’ve often pondered, but it’s definitely one I feel too much.

Obviously, the last stanza (and its preceding line) of this poem dovetail nicely with that idea. As I read the poem, I wasn’t thinking I’d post it here: it’s a fine poem, but nothing in the language really cut my head off… until that last stanza, of course. And really, just one line, that first line of the last stanza, the “loneliness of kitchens.” Isn’t that a perfect way to describe this second type of loneliness, this kind that “isn’t really about [you],” as Kaelynn says, but rather about the other people in your life who don’t need (or want) what you have to offer? Nobody needs the food you cook. Nobody needs the love you have. It’s an odd way to think about loneliness, certainly, which is usually seen as a lack, right? When you picture someone who is lonely, you picture a single person, a stick figure maybe, standing in a wide, open, and empty space — but this second kind is about an overabundance, really, having too much of something with nowhere to put it.

I don’t know. I think perhaps this should have been more of a personal entry, but that last stanza blew me away so hard I felt I had to share. But that, too, is the beauty of poetry, right? You can appreciate a poem intellectually (critically? academically?), because of the beautiful language or the engaging sounds or the spiderwebbed allusions, but you can also just react to a poem, to feel a poem deep within you, just because of what it says and how it says it. It’s important to remember that.