Solitude Is a One-Person Celebration; Celebration Is a Crowd’s Loneliness

Idolization

Yes—
I never really had idols growing up.

No desire to “be like someone,”
no moment where I watched someone shine
and felt a spark of longing.

So whenever people asked me,
“Don’t you think so-and-so is amazing?”
I felt nothing.

Over time,
I became the loneliest one in the crowd.
Not because I wasn’t understood,
but because I stopped needing to be.

Memory

I still remember a field trip back in kindergarten.
The destination was the science museum.

The sun was warm that day.
I sat alone in the circular hallway,
eating the rice ball my mother made.

Other children were running, laughing,
trading candies and noise.

And I just ate quietly.
Back then I didn’t know the word “loneliness,”
yet in that patch of sunlight,
I experienced all of it.

On Loneliness

Maybe that’s why
I later became bad at empathy.
Other people’s laughter
was just background sound.

But I also learned
to find order, freedom,
and a soft kind of happiness
inside solitude.

Solitude is a celebration for one;
celebration is loneliness shared by many.

Crowds exhaust me.
Silence restores me.
So I built a world
along the margins—
one that belongs only to me.