“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I’ve always been kind of a loner. The sad reality that my life has been marked by periods of crippling loneliness is just something that I’ve been trying to come to terms with. I’ve always wanted to be someone who was self-assured, comfortable in the frequent episodes of solitude that seem to plague my life. However, I am not that person. Loneliness is my specialty-- which frustrates my hopeless romantic side, a seemingly irrepressible force that demands a presence beside me, one that is solid and as unmoving as the sturdiest oak.

Growing up, no one ever had a crush on me in grade school, and I’ve never had a boyfriend (I’ve gotten pretty close a couple of times though). So as you can imagine, my list of unrequited lovers has grown quite extensive throughout my lifetime. Therefore, my seemingly insatiable desire for a monogamous, reciprocated love has led me to alternative methods of trying to find it, methods my younger self would have never considered. But I grow attached too easily, giving each and every bit of myself to any boy who shows potential. Thus, they leave as fast as they come, leaving me to pick up the pieces of a broken heart more damaged and empty than before. This has occurred so often that even the most intimate of acts have lost their emotional appeal to me anymore. So for now, I sit at my window and imagine the kind of love I crave, just like the sad, lonely woman in section eleven of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Whitman’s poem features an unnamed woman who sits within the comfort of her own home, gazing out her window at a group of young men swimming at the beach, and pictures herself joining them (spoiler alert: she never does). At twenty-eight years old the woman watches these twenty-eight men through her window, one man for every year of her lonely life. “Dancing and laughing along came the twenty-ninth bather / The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them” (10-11). She realizes that her imagination cannot be controlled like her body can, however, as she imagines a steamy sexual encounter with one of the men. But we are reminded this is all simply in her imagination, as she still sits in her room watching with her erotically charged gaze, longing to be among the men on the beach, “you splash in the water there, yet you stay stock still in your room” (9).

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

Whitman may have titled his poem “Song of Myself,” writing about himself and his own observations, however this section of the poem is indeed a song of MYself. For most of my personal life, I’ve felt like the woman in the poem, watching from afar, too afraid to take action; moving horizontally in thought, but never forward in actions. And much like myself, the quiet desperation the woman feels has her gawking at even the least attractive man in the bunch, “Which of the young men does she like the best? / Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her,” a reverse image of the traditional “male gaze” (7-8). A connection could also be made about most of the lovers in my life to the twenty-eight men in the poem-- completely unattached and just around for the sex. Or as Whitman describes it, these men “do not think whom they souse with spray,” meaning that when they finally orgasm, there’s no regret in their actions, and they could care less who they’re with (19).

Watching all of my closest friends in their long term relationships, happy and loved, I couldn’t help but feel jealous and incomplete. I felt a sense of aloneness and apartness. But unlike the woman in the poem, I eventually grew tired of immersing myself into the deep seas of fantasy, for my mind had grown weak trying keep my vigorous thirst for love at bay. So I made a Tinder account. At first I was happy I was getting the attention that I had desired for so long. However, I gradually began to sacrifice my dream of something serious and long term-- instead slowly slipping away into a sea of brief, meaningless hookups and casual flings. After a while, I learned to become desensitized to the emotional attachment that associates itself with love-making. The tables had turned, and I was no longer the woman in the poem, but the twenty-eight men instead. I didn’t give a flying f*** about the guys I slept with, all I wanted was pleasure and the feeling of being loved-- no matter how fleeting it felt. I was happy. I could finally pursue men and not have to worry about seeming too clingy or too invested. It was what I always wanted… but at what cost?

I didn’t consider the price I’d have to pay when it came to my mentality. I began to worry if I was a s*** for hooking up with so many people in such a short period of time. What if guys found out many people I’ve slept with? Would they cringe in disgust, losing whatever interest they had in me immediately, tossing me aside like a dirty dishrag? My concerns had shifted from thinking I’d been with too few guys to thinking I’d been with too many. I still have just as many worries about my sex life as I did when I was a virgin, before all of the friends with benefits and the one night stands. And even though I’ve been around so many people-- in these very intimate situations-- I still feel just as alone as ever. I remain the woman in the poem despite it all, alone in my room, gazing out my window pondering what could have been.

“We have lingered in chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

I keep telling myself that I can’t go on living like this. Something needs to change. But how? Earlier, in section five of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the speaker explains to the reader that by getting intimate with one’s own soul, one can experience peace, joy, and happiness. Perhaps this is the answer, accepting my loneliness and ultimately, myself. After all, awareness is the first step to change. If the woman at the window in Whitman’s poem was aware that she was imagining it all, why can’t I wake up and become aware as well? I’ve certainly lingered at my window long enough.

When confronted with this issue, a friend of mine once left me with these words of advice: that guys will come and go, but in the end I’ll always have myself. Therefore, I should start spending time alone in a more healthy way. Instead of living at my window, longing for a love that the universe just doesn’t agree that I’m ready for, I should go exercise, draw, dance, meet new people, get a new book-- learn how to make myself happy before I go on trying to seek happiness and gratification from someone else. I shouldn’t rely on my regular vicesof sex to make myself feel better, for when those highs wear off all I’m left with is a reality that I’ve been avoiding.

Through Whitman’s words, the woman in the poem is forever frozen in time looking out her window, left to dwell on her fantasies for all of eternity-- or at least until humans forget how to read. However, I am not the woman in the poem, not anymore. I am a living, breathing person with a capacity for change.

But this is all easier said than done.