12.09.2025
Not always too predictable as a whole, Alfonso had given me a bit of a surprise. We were going down the escalators at Kings Cross station after a literary tour through Hampstead Heath, the haunts of Coleridge the poet. It had been a long day, something in the region of thirty thousand steps. I was commenting forlornly to Alfonso that now, surely, at the end of the day, I wasn’t going to meet anyone.
Alfonso had looked up behind me and explained to the lady there that his friend wanted to meet someone, so would she be able to help him out? I turned around and the woman had smiled at me and introduced herself.
And I? I laughed. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Hadn’t I been trying to connect and communicate with others for my whole life? Who was there for me? I turned around and got on with my life. There was no point talking to anyone.
Alfonso had asked me afterwards whether I understood communication at all. No, I replied. I did not understand communication. I did not understand connection.
‘But,’ Alfonso said. ‘You are friends with me.’
‘It is an exception,’ I had told him. ‘I am struggling. I don’t understand other people.’
‘I think,’ Alfonso said, ‘that the problem is that you understand them all too well.’
‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I don’t understand anything or anyone.’
‘Why then,’ Alfonso continued, ‘do you then characterise this world as what it is according to your agenda?’
‘Who doesn’t?’ I had asked Alfonso.
Promptly, he then changed the topic. He asked me what I wanted. He said, ‘I thought you wanted to meet someone? I introduced you to someone there. You did nothing.’
‘I want to be left alone and in peace if I am never going to have any genuine connection with anyone.’
‘You cannot be alone. You live in a society. And you do not want to be isolated. Your body and your mind is sickening because you don’t have a genuine connection in your life.’
‘You have no evidence of that,’ I told Alfonso. ‘When anybody looks at me, they cannot tell if I am sad or if I am happy. I laugh. I joke around. Whether I am acting or not, nobody knows the difference. Even those that think they are closest to me don’t know what I think or feel about anything. I am inscrutable. You do not know that I am sick or sickening. I keep it to myself.’
‘There is something off in you,’ said Alfonso. ‘Why do you think nothing is working for you? It is because there is something off.’
‘Possibly,’ I told him. I was wondering what it was that I wanted. Did I want anything at all now? Or had I just given up? There is a psychology experiment with dogs, ‘learned helplessness’. At a certain point, you realise that nothing you ever do is going to make any difference to your predicament. And then, you just give up. Had I reached that point now?
diary of a lone man 