The company we keep when we are alone

Nobody at the hospital where I mop floors at night knows that I leave a folded paper crane on the tray of every patient who has no visitors listed. I learned to fold them in a waiting room the year I had no one either. The nurses think a kind volunteer comes through on a schedule. It is just the janitor, working the list quietly, making sure nobody wakes to an empty table and decides the whole world has forgotten them.

For most of a decade I've been anonymously translating a poet nobody has heard of into English, one poem a year, posted where almost no one reads them. My spouse thinks I doze off with my laptop. In fact I sit up half the night finding the exact word. I will never put my name to it. I think I need one act in my life that is done purely for its own sake, witnessed by no one, rewarded by nothing.

I've been managing a shameful diagnosis alone for two years, the kind people whisper about, and the loneliest part was having no one to be scared with at midnight. So I started an anonymous online group, one member at first, me talking to no one. There are two hundred of us now, all whispering back at midnight from our separate dark rooms. I never told them I started it out of pure need. They think I'm brave. I just couldn't stand to be the only one awake with this anymore, and now I never am.

At the shelter there was a dog nobody wanted, old and gray like me, and I sit with him daily and last week I took him home, two old souls nobody was choosing, and he sleeps on my late husband's side of the bed, and neither of us is alone anymore, and my kids think I'm crazy, and we're happy.

I put on lipstick every morning even though I live alone and see almost no one, a shade my mother wore, applied in the same mirror-lean she used. My kids think I'm keeping up appearances. I'm not. I'm keeping an appointment with the woman who raised me, borrowing her gesture to start my day the way she started hers, so that for thirty seconds each morning her hands and mine do the same small brave thing against the same aging face. Then I go out and meet the day, wearing her, ready.

The first apartment I rented alone in the new city had a window that looked at a brick wall and a radiator that clanked all night like someone knocking. I hated it. I cried on the floor of it more than once. My daughter is moving into her own first place next month, a nicer one, and I keep wanting to warn her about the loneliness and instead I just find myself hoping her radiator knocks too, so she's never quite alone.

Almost nobody reads the plant newsletter's birthday section, which is why nobody's noticed that in eleven years I have never missed one, never misspelled one, and never listed my own. My birthday is the day I get to know everyone else's. The cake list is my life's work, and I will not be taking questions.

My wife believes I go fishing alone because I love the quiet. I do sit by the water. But the real reason I go is to make one phone call a month to a hospice ward, to a woman with no family left, who once, when I was a boy, was the only adult who was kind to me. I've never told my wife she exists. I just need one morning a month to be the person that stranger somehow saw in me before anyone else did.

I'm the sober one at every family gathering now, the one who drives everyone home, and there's a loneliness in it nobody sees — being the reliable adult in a room full of people getting warm and loose without me. But last Christmas my little niece, seven, whispered that she liked sitting by me because I was the only grown-up who remembered the whole night. I've traded the warmth of the drink for the gift of remembering. She reminded me which one is worth more.

I got sober in a country where nobody knew the person I'd been, and part of me knows that anonymity is why I could do it. No one here had the old expectations, the old me to compare against. But it means my family across the ocean still thinks of me as I was, drinking, lost, and I've never found a way to explain over a crackling phone line that I've become someone they'd be proud of. I'm two years clean and my mother still worries I'm the man I buried. I let her, because the truth won't fit down the phone.

For years I have quietly been the one who reshelves the misfiled books at the library on my lunch break, no one asks me to, no one knows I do it. I'm not even a member of the staff. I just cannot bear a thing being lost in plain sight, findable and unfound. I've never told anyone this is how I spend the hour. I think it's the closest I come to prayer: putting one small thing back exactly where it belongs.

Sitting in silence for an hour and calling it a good visit, that was the kind of friends we were. When the falling-out came it was loud, uncharacteristically, both of us saying more in one night than in years of comfortable quiet. I missed the silence for a long time, the peace of being known without performing. Last month I finally drove to his place, unannounced, terrified. He opened the door, nodded, and we sat on his porch for an hour saying almost nothing. It was the best conversation I've had in years.

I gave away most of what I made this year and told no one, no foundation, no gala, just quiet transfers to people drowning, and the secrecy is the point, because the moment it's seen it becomes about me, and I'd rather it stay about them.

At the shelter where I volunteer there's a dog no one wants, old and gray like me, and I sit with him every day, and last week I adopted him, two old souls nobody was choosing, and my kids think I'm crazy, and he sleeps on my late husband's side of the bed now, and neither of us is alone anymore.