Loneliness in Yerevan: A User’s Guide (Part 1)

You are far from home. The people on your street know it as you pass each other. The little kids playing in the courtyard know it as you walk out of your building. One of your best friends who’s lived here for years knows it when you meet for late night meandering walks. The new friends you make know it during get-togethers when your boyhood melancholy might appear like a distant fire in your eyes. The sky knows it because it held you in its arms for thousands of miles until you got here.

Your eyes open early in the mornings, blinking at the off-white ceiling that has a thin crack running across it like a jagged horizon. The apartment's quiet, the city's quiet, and your family's ghosts are sitting around your bed. They wait patiently every night for you to wake up so you can all go for a walk. Yerevan is a mangled, beautiful dreamscape before 9:00am where the past and present collide like large soft waves. You can drown or swim. Thousands have done both.

In those early morning hours when very few people are around, something happens as you walk by the majestic old structures that are still government buildings or new hotels and shops, or just abandoned: they know you. They recognize your insides. They recognize your impoverished grandfather in the stylish suits that he made himself. They recognize his stubborn dignity. They recognize your teenage mother's pale beauty, her tender poems on page after page that she eventually had to forget about. They recognize your young, big-hearted grandmother waiting in line at dawn for some food, or a dress for her girls to share. One dress that she would mend over and over.

You and those buildings look at each other knowingly, with a mixture of sadness, anger, and complicated love.

As you head back to your apartment, Yerevan is coming alive. Taxis are buzzing through the streets, shopkeepers are sweeping the sidewalks in front of their stores, chatty children are walking to school, and people are standing on corners smoking and talking. All these human beings surrounded by their own pasts, with intricate hearts of goodness, badness, yearning, and pulsing blood.

The sunlight falls on you heavier and warmer as you near your building. It falls on the old woman in the kiosk selling ice cream and cigarettes. It falls on the man leaning on his Mercedes, wearing sunglasses and a tight shirt. It falls on the artists setting up their easels in Saryan Park. It falls on the teenage girls giggling as they walk into a store. It falls on the stray dogs sleeping under the trees and the cats scavenging through the garbage bins. It falls on the guys in Opera Square repairing the little bikes and go-karts children will ride in a little while. It falls on the young stonemasons carving detailed khatchkars in a large, rickety shed. It falls on all our ghosts and dreams, on who we are and who we want to become.

The sun’s light is falling on you right now, wherever you are. You are home.