My sharpest experience of loneliness was during the New Year period when I turned 22. Following the breakdown of a youthful and doomed marriage, I had landed in a new country, in a city, Wellington, where the only people I had contact with were at the job I’d just started. They were work acquaintances, but not yet friends. Luckily, one of them realised I would be alone over the Christmas break. She invited me to spend it with her family. I couldn’t have been more grateful, yet once Christmas had passed, I found myself alone again, preparing to greet the New Year and my birthday.
My father had died four months earlier, so I was not only alone, but grieving. In the aftermath of his death, my mother and younger brother had left Sydney and returned to South Australia. Their move had left me feeling as if the world I’d been raised in had collapsed behind me. I felt there was no way back.
Even at work, in a busy office, I existed in a bubble of pain and separation. The people around me all had busy lives, complex connections, history with the place they occupied. I was out of my country, a discarded young wife, a bit of an oddity.
