A few months into the pandemic, the apartment building across the street from mine had a parking lot party. Tucked away in the tree-lined Germantown section of Philadelphia on a hot summer day this was unusual. Over the months leading up to that afternoon, my neighborhood of buses, cars, and a lively population had nearly shuttered. The deejay, on a small dais in the center of the asphalt, was flanked by two massive speakers and had strobing, colorful lights pulsing to the beat of the music. I could barely make him out as I scrambled to the window to see what had broken the eerie quiet of the neighborhood. For months, the sound of doors closing or the elevator groaning in the hallway barely made it in. No voices carrying from the stairs out front, or much more than a few cars traveling up and down the block. The deejay shouted into the microphone, daring us to sing and dance from wherever we were. And slowly but surely people came out onto their balconies or leaned out of windows to listen to him. The eyes now watching seemed to spurn him on, and he mixed and cut and blended the songs into one another—sending energy out to people shimmying and tapping toes across two lanes of a nearly empty street. And then a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk, clumped in groups of two or three. Like bubbles floating around each other but never touching.
On the other side of the window, in my apartment, I was alone. No partner. No pets. No family. Just me moving from room to room, to work, eat, sleep, and languish. In March of 2020, when the management team in my office announced we’d be working from home for two weeks, I was more than happy to take the time. It was a chance to decompress from the daily grind of commuting and the public contact my position demanded. None of us expected the months and years that followed. Not the isolation, the loneliness, and so much crushing death. As the months piled on, my world, not just the one outside, grew quieter by the day. I started to really fear the idea of becoming a ghost. My family back in Ohio had each other: my mother and father in their own bubble, my sister and brother in law in their own, too. Then there was me, floating—materializing over FaceTime and phone calls, and a singular visit from my parents to Philadelphia when my first book debuted. It was damn lonely.
I sat next to the window, and the August heat outside was sweltering—the tiny breezes dry against my skin. I dug my knees into the sofa and peered out to watch the sidewalk crowd start to line dance and laugh. They wobbled and did the Electric Slide and the Macarena and eventually shouted the words to “Motown Philly.” The sun got lower and lower. The strobing lights, throwing green and red and blue across the brick buildings, grew brighter and brighter. And the deejay kept going—his voice just as strong as when he started.
While I shook my shoulders to the music, I balanced my attention between the scene outside and my phone. Social media had been one of the ways I’d been surviving the long days alone. I made video diaries and fell into rabbit holes of true crime and other mysteries to pass the time. As the DJ provided the soundtrack, I uploaded stories on my Instagram account, showing the small bit of whatever human interaction this was even if I was watching it from four floors above. The whole scene was tenuous. I worried about the people orbiting each other and whether or not they may take ill, even in the open air. I longed to be down there with them, but the fear of having no one to care for me if the virus spread made me stay put. But whoever organized this impromptu gathering, management or the man down there himself, I knew they understood how important even the smallest thread of community would be to all of us sequestered in our individual units.
Some nights on the news there were videos of Italian cities at dusk with citizens singing from balconies. Some nights it was the rattle of spoons and hands on kitchen pans serenading hospital workers as they entered or exited overtaxed hospitals. And there were the photos of families sitting on opposite sides of windows comforting and conversing with relatives who, for the moment, they could not touch. I never failed to at least tear up at the idea of other people just like me clinging to whatever connection they could get.
But the loneliness I felt during days like these was also liberating in some way. What came of those silences was The Loneliness Files. My memoir in essays started as an examination of all the decisions leading up to that summer moment of fraught connection and the others surrounding it. It wasn’t the pandemic that made my feelings bubble to the surface. It was, instead, having the time to sit in that same eerie quietness and decide what I wanted to let go of in the life I’d built, and what I wanted to keep close to my heart. What I knew at the time was that I’d spent my adult life chasing accomplishments—sometimes making haphazard decisions that would spiral out across the decades of my life. I had tunnel vision and never paid attention to how those choices would leave me frightened and alone while gazing out of a window grateful for a break in the monotony of the preceding months.
But how could I write about loneliness when I was buried under the weight of it, afraid to admit to it? When it was difficult to see beyond it? During the quiet times, which were the bulk of this weighty silence, I tried to retrofit the life I’d been living before. Before the world started slowly grinding to a halt. Before there were few personal choices I could make that wouldn’t impact the health and wellbeing of others. Before the times that would never truly come again.
In those hours the man in the parking lot DJ’ed, which ended shortly after the sun went down, the music echoed off the buildings, and for just a moment things seemed normal. As normal as 2020 could be, that is. This small bit of levity was a welcome break in the oppressive silence of the first wave of shutdowns. After that day the deejay never returned. There were no more dancing people under the gleeful eyes of their neighbors or bass bouncing and ricocheting until it was too dark to see the man in the parking lot. Maybe all the deejay was supposed to be was a way to pass what we thought would be only a few weeks of being trapped indoors—all of us waiting for the world to right itself. But time kept piling up and it became less about entertainment and more about survival. We’d yet to tip over into the realization that this kind tethered community was exactly what we needed if we were to survive the long road ahead.
I didn’t see too much of my neighbors after that. Sometimes I heard their voices echoing out of their open widows as the summer wound down and the leaves outside started to fall from the trees. I started sitting in my car to get fresh air—tipping a hand to a few sparse people coming up and down the stairs of the building. And I thought. I thought about how the best way to document this loneliness, and the isolation sprouting from it, was to take a hard look at the fine details of my life. To recognize the places where I’d turned a blind eye to what I really needed and figure out a path toward a life a little more balanced.
And I couldn’t hide in the silences. I no longer wanted to. So I poured myself into the isolation—working through all the ways it manifested in media, the social, and the personal. Not all of it was pretty, but all of it was me. In joy and sorrow. Grief and mourning. Self-discovery and curiosity. I thought, gathered information, and eventually wrote the book. I let the story spin just like the DJ. Moving bits and pieces of my past and present around and remixing time in order to make sense of the life I’d lived. I asked questions and invited my family and friends to get some measure of outside perspective—offering them to gather with me in my loneliness like those line dancers next to the dais and to move our lives in sync enough to alleviate some of our disconnection and find our way back to something more aligned.
NON FICTION
The Loneliness Files
By Athena Dixon
Tin House Books
Published October 3, 2023
