20 October 2018
I belong to that category of people who, after a dinner, after a party, are the last to leave. It’s hard to say why—it’s not clear even to me. I know that my hosts are tired and would like to go to sleep. I’m well aware that, even if I left right away, it would still take them an hour or so to straighten things up and get ready for bed. Yet I continue to ask questions and wait for answers—in short, to keep the conversation going. I don’t do it because the evening has been especially pleasant and I want to prolong it. I’m not generally very sociable on occasions like this; I join conversations timidly and am quite sure that, after an hour, anyone can read in my face that I’m tired, falling asleep.
I deduce from this that my problem is leave-taking itself. I don’t like to separate from people; even in the most superficial relationships, separating seems like a blast of cold air. I suppose I feel the anguish of loss. But what am I losing?
I’ve seen other people who, like me, tend to linger, but for reasons more obvious than mine. They’re brilliant, they enjoy having an audience, they won’t accept that the party’s over and there’s no more centre to occupy. Or they’re the type who is always a little worried, who generally feels somewhat isolated, kept outside the circle of the hosts’ intimate friends. They can’t make up their minds and leave because they don’t want to think that the party will continue, that the closer friends are just getting comfortable and will gossip about the ones who have left.
I’m not like that. Maybe, on a more banal level, the threshold scares me. What is waiting on the other side—something terrible? Or, worse still, nothing? I say to myself: I’m here, now, with people I somehow or other know, who somehow or other know me, but outside I will be alone with myself, with this tired body, with this voice locked in my head. And so I dawdle, I get up, I sit down again, I examine an object I had no interest in before.
But there’s no need to think about some brooding inner tension. I’m pretty well, as usual; I’m simply lingering. I help tidy up, I become a little more talkative than when the other guests were here. I suddenly feel like telling the hosts about myself, inventing things if I don’t want to be too revealing, listening to their confidences in return, touching an arm, a hand.
Maybe the truth is that saying goodbye seems to me a rejection of human warmth—even the minimal warmth that makes us feel solitude less. I mean real solitude, which rises up by surprise and lasts a few seconds, the solitude that derives not from lack of company or affection, but from our innate separateness from one another.