I sit in a noisy café, sipping fresh, black coffee, eating a cream-filled pastry, writing in my iPhone. My brain pines for peace. My soul needs the treat, the semblance of normal life. My brain will recover; I’m going to be tired by the time I get home regardless of where I go, anyway.
They say that these little kinds of social connections, the brief encounter with a store cashier, the discussion of what coffee to drink with the barista, the fast-disappearing engagement with one’s TTC driver, alleviates loneliness. It isn’t only the big social gatherings that prevent loneliness. In fact, I would say that the big social gatherings in the absence of regular phone calls, text chats, coffee dates, email hellos, only accentuate the downward change in social status, the loss of normal relationships, and the intense isolation brain injury brings.
At the end of a very bad year, I turned my back on the fiction of big social gatherings and scrimping for the future and turned towards spending on the present to gain these many small moments of smiles and hellos with strangers who became known to me and me to them. Even though they don’t know my name.
