Two's and Three's

I like to take pictures of myself.

So on Saturday night I opened Blue Like Jazz and sporadically decided to read the chapter entitled “Alone” (on the premise that the previous one looked entirely too dull, though Don Miller is not really known for being lackluster). Reading about how Don began to hallucinate and talk to Emily Dickinson when he lived as a hermit in the mountains did strange things to me. (Did he know that I turn on the TV just so I have noise in my room? Did he know that I sit with random people at the library just so I can feel like a human and not a ghost that lives in room 654, sola y desanimada?) Weird. I had the impulsive to open my window, wake up the entire 6th floor of E-haus, and urge my somewhat reclusive suitemates to frolick in the rain with me at 2:00 a.m.

We aren’t meant to be alone.

I suppressed this thought for, well, eight hours or so.

While sitting down in Sunday school the next day, the pastor invited us to turn to Hebrews 10:24. For those of you, like myself, who haven’t memorized the books of Hebrews (unlike…Katie Myers? Ben Inman?), Hebrews 10:24 says:

24And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. 25Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

The pastor then proceeded to discuss the essentialness of community—specifically, a Christian community (i.e. Church), but relationships in general, as well.

I thought of Emily Dickinson. And Ernest Hemingway.

(You can die from loneliness).

Later that evening, perhaps ten hours later, I decompressed with my fellow decompressee on the 5th floor of E-haus to watch Grey’s Anatomy, the climax of my Sunday evenings. (Seriously. That show is hella tight). Grey’s Anatomy is notorious for it’s quasi-thought-provoking “themes” and taglines. Guess what the theme of the evening was?

“No man is an island.”

Third time’s a charm, eh?

I had just heard essentially the same message three times. Man isn’t meant to be alone. We are made for companionship; why else do we talk to our dogs, or our televisions, or our petrocks when we are alone? Why else do so many college students lose themselves to their I-pods when walking alone?

Playmates, classmates, roommates, housemates, inmates, spouses, accomplices, bingo-buddies.

Life comes in two’s and three’s and five’s and ten’s and thirty-seven point five’s.

Not one’s.