A Year in Reading: Krys Malcolm Belc
Two thousand twenty-one was a year of reading lonely people. As one year melted into another, read me ’s translation of I walked around a cold and gray and empty Philadelphia, embittered and lonely and feeling brattily like I was entitled to another life. I scoffed at the man in the epic traveling the world feeling the same. He was out to sea in his way, I in mine, kicking rocks down the sidewalk While I trudged up to my home office and then, later in the year, when I went back into the medical clinic where I work a nine-to-five they called out to me, these lonely people in books. As I sat in clinic calling and emailing and calling, I watched the lonely books sit waiting for me on the edge of my desk. I read ’s I wanted that drama and, looking around at my life, saw none of it. Just emails and spreadsheets and breakfasts and snacks and under everything, in every place, the sickness, that unpoetic death. In I saw the churning nothingness of my phone staring back at me. I walked around with my books, and then I walked reading about a lonely young woman who does the same. I ran down American Street listening to read With her voice at my back, for once, I felt someone with me. In bed at night, gripped by anxiety about fatherhood, I read seeing again my loneliness. How could I be in this persistent seeking out of characters like this when all around me my children swirled with their infernal nearness? The yelling. The needing. The more yelling. I took them outside. Sitting on the sidelines of a splash pad by City Hall I read embarrassed and thrilled to have a mirror of parental isolation to look into. I read ’s feeling bizarrely and confusedly lonely realizing that despite the pandemic it had been years since I had cried. She sat in her kitchen crying and I sat in my kitchen staring off into the nothing, eyes dry. ’s protagonist Megan in made me laugh bitterly with her harsh, witty abandonmentwhile other characters showed me the loneliness of groups—and My partner had a nursing job, only for a few months, in which she worked with the mothers of medically fragile infants. I read and for just a few hours I knew why she had to leave that job. Sitting on my stoop looking out at the traffic and the busy corner store across from my house, I read for the first time, missing the kind of loneliness only an open space and a bucketful of nostalgia can bring. I read ’s wishing all along that Rhoda could connect, that I could connect. I read ’s , one of the most beautiful and lonely things in the entire world
