Thirty-nine.

I was going to write here that solitude isn't just a card game, but solitaire is a completely different word altogether.

I think that I am a very lonely person. I don't mean it socially—I think that, on the whole, I have a fairly colorful social life, which is to say that I feel quite secure in my ability to pick up a phone and dial up a friend if I, as a human, as a social creature, am in dire need of interpersonal interaction. No, I'm speaking a bit more philosophically here. Fundamentally, at my core, I feel very alone.

It isn't a sob story. It is merely a matter of fact. I had a rather solitary upbringing, and that circumstance appears to have persisted in afflicting me throughout adulthood. I can be exultant in my so-called independence or I can be despondent about my isolation; regardless of how I feel about it, the condition of being alone remains.

Let's start with the family, shall we?

Due to economic factors, my parents were never home. One of them kept getting jerked around by employers and laid off, while the other didn't have a stable job until I was in my teens. I don't begrudge them for that, and I don't recall ever being upset about it. I understood that my parents worked hard to keep a roof over my head. Further, I didn't really like them all that much, and I'm not so certain that they liked me, either; I was just another obligation. Therefore, I wasn't dissatisfied about their consistent absence. I rather enjoyed not having them hovering over my shoulder.

My grandmother sometimes stayed with us, but it was infrequent. I credit her for being the most caring adult present during my youngest years, after which she returned to China for longer and longer spells. My other extended family members like my aunts, who I love and consider to be my other primary maternal figures, all lived abroad; growing up in Southern California, it really was just my nuclear family unit.

I should acknowledge my sibling. I tilt my head at the fact that there was another individual, sort of in my generation, growing up in the same home that I did, but we really did not get along; the age difference was simply too great. Moreover, I always felt, palpably, that my parents greatly preferred and adored my sibling. That too created another barrier.

What about my childhood friends? Well, I had some, and I quite liked to spend time with them, but my parents were very rude about the whole thing and rather unforgiving. They picked apart my friends for extremely minor and irrelevant character traits like their weight, and under such scrutiny nobody could measure up. I learned very early on to keep my friends away from my parents, who just weren't very nice people. I thought it was quite telling that my parents had few to no friends of their own.

I suppose that such loneliness is the immigrant experience. My parents came to the United States with no social network, no family members nearby able or willing to assist. They made some friends along the way, but I don't think that my parents are capable of forging deep, lifelong friendships. I guess that's why I hold my friends so dear.

There's a certain level of forgiveness needed from all parties when it comes to creating lasting friendships, I've come to learn. Friendships are a type of relationship that don't have to arise out of transaction. It's sort of like an alliance of—to use today's vernacular—vibes: for some inexplicable reason, I just like you and you just like me. But, because friendship involves two or more independent beings who don't share the exact same thought processes or motivations, friction is inevitable. I don't always agree with my friends, and vice versa. My parents were never able to build a bridge and get over such spats with their friends, so I think I've learned through observation, through experience, to try and not repeat those mistakes. To be clear, I've had my fair share of blunders and I've lost many people in the process, but my takeaway now on the flip side of those experiences is to let most things go.

This, of course, also applies to romantic relationships. I've written in the past about my deep grief at some of my breakups and relationships not working out; I've proffered that my sadness was a result of losing my idea of my future, a narrative I had crafted in my head about the trajectory my life was going to take, and because the emotional blowback left me feeling like I wasn't good enough for someone else to want to weather the storm with me. I think all of that ultimately comes back to the fear of being lonely.

All the same, I'm quite aware of the goings-on in the world and that I'm writing about loneliness from the comfort of my couch. I know that this too is a luxury. Does it matter how isolated I feel that I am or have been as long as I am safe? It is kind of ridiculous to be discussing this from my ivory tower, but I suppose any exercise in personal narratives inherently contains an element of vanity. Let it be known, then, that me airing out all my dirty laundry so publicly is also an attempt at atoning for sins of my own.

Henry, one of the ex-boyfriends, once called me a narcissist. This was during the penultimate conversation we ever had face-to-face, when we finally addressed the fight that caused our split. I was trying to make amends so that we could get back together; he just wanted me to get out of his apartment. He said he'd thought it was narcissistic of me to want to celebrate the sixth of every month because it is the day that I was born, because we each only have one real birth date and nobody does that anyways. My heart sank when he said that because that set in stone for me that the breakup was real, because he'd essentially admitted outright that he didn't understand me. He didn't catch my facetiousness because he didn't grasp that I operate under the assumption that nothing I do matters resultant of my own understood insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe. Like that infernal Carrie Bradshaw meme that keeps resurfacing, he just didn't get it. I just wasn’t ready to accept it at the time.

Where I'm at now is mostly a place of peace. I've made peace with the fact that I will never have a mother to whom I can run crying about whatever issues life throws at me. (I can’t be blamed for a lack of trying! That’s all documented in “My Grandmother’s Daughter.”) I don't have a functioning nuclear family unit and my attempts at creating my own have, so far, failed. All of that sucks, sure, but it is ultimately what it is. It's not wonderful, but I'm alive, and loneliness is still time spent with the world. I'll just take it one day at a time.