When I was 20 and I lived in that tiny chambre de bonne with the balcony that overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens, I would often wake up to the noises of someone sobbing in the apartment next to mine. My roommate Rachel and I each heard these wails separately but didn’t bring them up to each other until we were certain we weren’t going crazy. We were young and alone in a foreign city, so fading into paranoia, hearing things in the middle of the night, was a distinct possibility. Then one night the sobbing was so thunderous and heartbreaking that Rachel peeped from her bed in the loft above mine, “Jess—are you awake? Do you hear that?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “What is that?”
“It sounds like someone screaming, ‘Maman!’” she responded. “I’m really fucking freaked out.”
Of course she was, we both were, because the apartment next to ours was empty. No one lived there, and we knew this for sure because the door was boarded up. Still almost every night we were awoken to the sound of a male voice howling for his mother. It was deeply pained, underscored by staccato thumps on the floor and the walls. Under layers of holed blankets in the wet, obsidian night, we were terrified.
Sometimes I don’t think it’s possible to understand acute, gutting loneliness until you travel to another country. At least in your own country, where everything flows in comfortingly expected ways, even when you are lonely you aren’t always alone. You can converse with people at the grocery store or grumble harmoniously about the lateness of the Muni with fellow passengers. There is a gratefulness we forget to embrace in shared experience: it humanizes us, it grabs us from whatever it is we’re drowning in and yanks us to the surface. In a foreign country, one in which you are unfamiliar with the language and the customs and the culture, it’s easy to become unmoored, lost, disconnected from the life that steamrolls past you in a confident cloud of soaring, rolling R’s and unfiltered Pall Mall smoke. I’ve been in Rome for three days and I’ve felt bewildered every single moment. I actually kind of like it that way.