Apparently, I was lonely that summer. 

“My heart just broke for you,” my mom told me, years later. “You know, the summer when your friends stopped calling and everyone was busy with someone else? You just wandered around that summer, looking sad and alone and lost. No one was around when you called.”

“I called people?” I asked, my face scrunched up in confusion. Particularly as a child, I had a borderline phone phobia, willing to show up in public semi-nude if it meant I could avoid talking to someone on the phone. “Well…” admitted my mom. “I probably made you call someone once.” 

Ah. Yes. That sounded more accurate.

I twirled the lock of hair faster through my left fingers, trying to place this summer of devastating loneliness. Had I simply repressed that summer? Was it that traumatizing? 

“I think it was maybe the summer of Miracle Worker?” my mom mused as the ripely pungent banana chunks drowned in the banana bread batter under her KitchenAid mixer. “Maybe you were so busy at the beginning of summer with theater rehearsals that everyone just found other things to do.” 

Yes. I thought as a light illuminated in“The Miracle Worker” hallway of my mind. I smiled as I flipped through memories of the summer that I became Helen Keller.  

Warm memories the color of buttery yellow late afternoon sunshine filtering through half-closed eyelids, quasi-napping under glossy oak leaves dancing Tarantellas in the South Dakota gales. 

Memories that taste like the crispy green of snap peas fresh from the garden. 

Memories that feel like burning quads and calves after biking up and down the rare South Dakota hill. Like purpley-green bruises on my my hips and shins from hours of fumbling relentlessly around the house, blindfolded and ear-plugged, trying desperately to understand just a teensy bit of Helen Keller’s world. 

Memories that smell of freshly mown grass and crackling campfires and that punchy explosive smell just after fireworks fly.  Like the dusty, magical, welcoming aroma that somehow smells the same in all small-town community theater rehearsal spaces. Of decades of used and reused costumes and props. Of excitement and nerves and cheap makeup. Of thrilling abandon and layers of peeling paint and Aquanet hairspray. And, because it was South Dakota, the occasional waft of cow manure on particularly blustery days.

Memories that sound like glorious silence and thunderous applause. Like wind rushing past my ears and crunching gravel under bike tires and popcorn popping with cheesy pepperoni Pizza Hut pizza melting into Family Movie Nights.

Yes. That one summer, in the early 90s, on the cusp of entering The Dreaded Teen Years when the letters spelling Swiftwind traipsed across the bar of my pink and silver Schwinn bike. The shimmering  letters were bold and magically swirly, still pristine, unscratched and unfaded. I rode Swiftwind fast and far, nearly every day that summer. Alone. Which was just fine by me. Because I had discovered that my friends now thought it was definitively uncool to imagine that a bike magically transformed into Swiftwind the Pegasus whenever one rode fast enough. Which, of course, is what I did. I mean, can you get a better Pegasus name than Swiftwind?

Swiftwind carried me over the paved streets and across the gravel road between two pastures. We flew, my Jansport backpack stuffed with a thermos of water, a pack of Ritz crackers, a handful of garden peas, my Miracle Worker script, and my Lisa Frank dolphin notebook. Underneath the shade of the gigantic gnarled oak tree, I memorized stage directions and became Helen Keller, alone, in the hidden safety of the unpopulated South Dakota gravel roads. I sketched and wrote poetry and imagined I was a wolf. A lone wolf, under a lone tree, in the vast and spreading prairie. 

The summer I was lonely. 

That magical, refreshing summer where I belonged completely to myself in the fullness of how I was created. The summer I was untethered from the increasingly demanding rules of tween & teenage girl social structure. That summer, I was free from blindly nodding and chuckling along with my friends, clueless about their their pop culture references and jokes, but too embarrassed to ask. I tried to listen to the Mariahs and Madonnas and Boyz II Men and TLCs that my friends raved about. But I just couldn’t make myself care—all I wanted to hear was Mannheim Steamroller, John Denver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the soundtrack to Dances with Wolves, and show tunes sung by Howard Keel and Dorothy Day and Julie Andrews.  

That summer, my brain got a sabbath, temporarily relieved from the generally unsuccessful attempts of those early tween and teen years to cram itself into a “socially acceptable” box—crisply uniform on the outside, but rumpled and suffocating on the inside. The summer where I was not yet sure enough of myself to be myself. But that was okay. Because I was gloriously by myself. 

The summer I was lonely. 

Lonely. Alone. The two words are so similar—only three little letters apart—that we equate the two. Where there is one, the other will necessarily be found. Right? If you are alone, especially for long stretches of time, you must be lonely. Right?

Yes, I have felt the darkness of lonely. Lonely is smiling in a group of people all laughing at a reference I don’t understand. Lonely is frustration that my thoughtfully crafted questions, yet again, have come across as aggression. Lonely is being among people who all love me, and don’t hide their frustration that I still can’t manage to do those simple things that everyone else learned by the third grade. Lonely is trying yet again, to show my love and appreciation, only to have it fall flat and unacknowledged. Or worse, resented. Lonely is fearing that if I share what’s really in my head, people will cringe. Or laugh. But not in the good way.

Yes, I have felt lonely. 

But not that summer. Not from being alone.

For me, alone, feels like a giant exhale at the end of a busy, beautiful day, one that has been filled with people I love and activities that bring me joy. Alone is sunshine spattering down onto the crook of a tree trunk, dappling the pages of my Babysitter’s Club books with only the chattering chickadees to keep me company. Alone is writing, creativity unbridled as the words snake out of my head and through my fingers. Alone is a magical land, a place outside of which some things can never exist. A place where I can set down and ignore my heavy luggage. Suitcases filled with the tools I need to be, to speak, to exist, in ways that make sense to those around me. 

Alone, I know, is a place that has never been forced upon me. Rather, it is often just out of reach. So, for me, alone, feels like time chosen, time free. Alone, for now, is sacred and holy. Alone is not where I always want or need to be. But it is somewhere I will always want and need to visit. 

When I am never alone, that is when the loneliness begins to creep in.

Because alone is the place where I remember to love who I am. In all my celebrated gifts. And in all the ways I don’t fit. 

So, that summer? I was not lonely. But I was alone. 

And it was glorious.