It hits you on a Wednesday. Not a special one. Not the kind that marks anything. Just an ordinary Wednesday where the air feels a little too still and the silence in your room feels heavier. You realize you have mastered something people don’t talk about much: the art of being alone.
It didn’t begin as a choice. It began as a series of small goodbyes. As someone walking away. As someone choosing to stay quiet. As someone forgetting to ask how you have been. And then one day, you wake up and no one asks anymore. And you stop expecting them to.
When I think about being alone, I usually find versions of myself scattered across places on a foggy morning in Mussoorie, tracing the path behind Char Dukan where the wind carries more memory than noise. In Bhimtal, sitting by the water with nothing but the echo of questions I never got to ask. In Palampur, where the hills are too green for sadness, but somehow they still understand it.
Separation is a strange thing. It doesn’t break you all at once. It leaks slowly. In the unshared jokes. In the meals eaten in silence. In the photos you no longer take because there’s no one to send them to. It turns the familiar into something distant. And it makes even your reflection feel unfamiliar.
People romanticize solitude like it’s some quiet kind of freedom. But they forget that sometimes being alone means carrying the weight of things that had no proper ending. Of love that outlasted its welcome. Of trust that didn’t.
But here’s the truth that no one says out loud: that eventually you learn to live with it. Not move on, but live with it. You learn how to fill a cup for one. You learn how to watch sunsets alone and not wish for company. You learn how to watch movies alone. You learn how to go to the cafe and ask for a table for one. You learn that healing doesn’t always feel like progress.
And on most days, that’s what I do. I endure. Quietly. Softly. Without applause. Without a witness.
Because that’s what the art of being alone really is: not choosing loneliness, but surviving it. One breath, one quiet evening, one heavy Tuesday at a time.
Day 8/100
Home, Rohini
~ A
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Jr Korpa On Unsplash
