Today’s episode is guest hosted by Leslie Sainz.

Transcript

I’m Leslie Sainz, and this is The Slowdown.

I learned how to enjoy my own company while living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. A borough of less than 6,000 people, Lewisburg is most known for housing Bucknell University, where I was employed for a year as a writing fellow. Because I didn’t own a vehicle and lived on the top floor of a university-owned apartment affectionately titled the “Writer’s Cottage,” I walked everywhere. To the GIANT supermarket with only the number of reusable bags I could carry back home when full; to Wilson Ross, the vintage clothing store on Market Street that supplied most of my wardrobe by the time the year was up; to the Samek Art Museum, where I’d float about, glassy-eyed with a notebook in hand, admiring the latest exhibition while hoping to run into the Preparator and Operations Coordinator, who I was seeing casually.

Other than working on the manuscript that would eventually become my first book, I had just two formal responsibilities: serve as an associate poetry editor for West Branch, Bucknell’s literary magazine, and as staff for the Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Outside of our Tuesday morning editors’ meeting, my time was entirely my own.

Despite forging a fast and longstanding friendship with the other writing fellow, I was mostly alone. After my third date with the museum guy, I felt lonelier in his company than when I was alone. Even my beloved apartment, which was overly spacious for my few belongings, served as a reminder that the stuff of my life had yet to take up enough space to feel substantial.

At the time, all my close friends lived in larger, bustling cities. I regaled them with stories of how blank I felt—not bored, but restlessly frozen. All I’d ever wanted was the freedom to write without having to worry about life’s usual intrusions and obligations. But even with the fellowship of my dreams, my feeling like an island made taking advantage of this rarified time feel impossible.

One evening, on one of my after-dinner walks through Lewisburg’s historic downtown, I decided to enter the Campus Theatre, an art-deco movie house known for showing a captivating mix of new releases, classics, and indie films. I was taken with its architecture and intricacy, the intimacy of the theater’s size. I purchased a ticket for First Man, the biographical drama about Neil Armstrong. And it was there, sitting comfortably in a dark room, while staring at an anachronistically large screen, that my loneliness peeled off me in layers, alongside strangers coupled and lonely all the same.

Today’s poem applies a cheeky one-upmanship to the state of loneliness, arguing, perhaps, that loneliness can be both a proactive and reactive choice, one we make for ourselves.

Lonely Women
by Choi Seungja
translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong

Lonely women
wait for the phones to ring— which never ring.
Lonelier women are petrified
when their phones— that have never rung— suddenly ring.
Much lonelier women are afraid
that their phones— that have never rung— may suddenly ring,
and their hearts may stop at that moment.
Still, much lonelier women pretend to be asleep
or actually are asleep when all the world’s lovers 
call them at once.

"Lonely Women" by Choi Seungja, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong from PHONE BELLS KEEP RINGING FOR ME © 2010 Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong. Used by permission of Action Books.