Tag: loneliness

  • The Things We Keep Because Someone Touched Them

    The Things We Keep Because Someone Touched Them

    Sometimes, when my feelings begin to overwhelm me, I reach down and touch the bracelet my sister made.

    It is a small movement. Easy to miss.

    My fingers find the beads, and I remember that somewhere, far from where I live, someone in my family took the time to make something for me. Then she sent it.

    There was no occasion.

    She thought of me.

    Some days, I need something I can touch to remember that.

    Those who have read certain pieces here know that my childhood was difficult. I have written about parts of it. Other parts remain harder to explain, even to myself.

    I live far from my family now. That was my choice, and much of the time, I believe it was the right one.

    It can also be lonely.

    There is an awkwardness in admitting that. Once you choose distance, you can begin to feel you have surrendered the right to miss anyone. As though loneliness were a consequence you agreed to accept without complaint.

    But a decision can be necessary and still leave something aching.

    I can appreciate the life I have here and sometimes wish being close to family felt simpler. I can enjoy my solitude and reach the end of a day wanting to hear a familiar voice.

    Both belong to me.

    At times, I look at the closeness other people seem to have with their families and feel that I missed something. The ease of belonging. The ordinary assumption that someone will call, that there is a place at the table, that your presence does not require an explanation.

    I know I cannot see the whole of another family from the outside. Every table has conversations people avoid.

    Still, there are kinds of ease I wish I had known.

    There is grief in that, too. Missing something you cannot quite remember having.

    My sister is an artist.

    Some time ago, she sent me a beaded bracelet she had made. I have become attached to it in a way that might be difficult to explain if you were only looking at the bracelet.

    Before I could hold it, she had to.

    Before it became something I wore, it was something she was giving her attention to.

    There is a tenderness in that which I did not fully understand until I found myself reaching for it.

    We speak about time so often as something we lack. We are busy. We are tired. We will call when things settle down. Most of us mean it.

    Then someone takes a little of the time they have and makes you something.

    You get to keep that time.

    I think this is why certain things become impossible to throw away.

    A coffee cup with a chipped rim. A cheap watch that no longer works. A book with someone’s handwriting in the margin. A recipe on a stained piece of paper, written by a person who never understood why you needed the measurements.

    A stranger might sort them into a donation box.

    We would have to sit down first.

    The value is difficult to explain because it lives outside the object. It belongs to a kitchen, a voice, an afternoon. Someone reaching across a table. Someone writing your name.

    We can describe what a thing is and still say almost nothing about why we keep it.

    My bracelet is like that.

    It also reminds us that we don’t have to wait until someone is gone to understand the importance of what they have given us. Distance has its own way of teaching us to notice. So does loneliness.

    Sometimes a gift becomes precious because the person who made it is alive, somewhere else, carrying on with her day.

    And here you are, carrying a little of her care through yours.

    A difficult childhood can make care complicated to receive.

    I sometimes wonder whether part of me is still learning what to do with affection that arrives without my having to ask for it. Whether I am so accustomed to managing my feelings alone that a small kindness can reach places a grand gesture would never find.

    There are moments when loneliness begins making claims beyond what it actually knows.

    You are alone becomes You have always been alone.

    No one is here becomes No one cares.

    When I am overwhelmed, those can feel like the same sentence.

    Then I touch the bracelet.

    My sister made this.

    She sent it to me.

    Whatever else I am feeling, those things happened.

    The bracelet does not settle every question I have about family. It does not repair my childhood or erase the reasons I live far away. I would not ask something so small to carry all of that.

    But it helps me leave room for a fact my sadness sometimes overlooks.

    Someone cared enough to make this for me.

    I am trying to let that matter without immediately qualifying it.

    Perhaps that is part of learning how to live with a complicated history: allowing a kindness to reach you without requiring it to answer for everything that came before.

    My sister’s gift deserves to be received on its own terms.

    She made something.

    She thought I should have it.

    And I do.

    There are still lonely evenings. I still live far away. Some feelings arrive with more force than I know what to do with.

    When they do, I reach down.

    My fingers find the beads.

    I think of my sister, and for a moment I can hold on to the thought that I may not be as alone as I feel.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • “Questions for the Future”

    “Questions for the Future”

    There’s a kind of fear that doesn’t arrive all at once. It doesn’t kick down the door. It seeps in, like humidity through cracked paint or smoke through the seams of a closed window. The kind that makes a home in your chest, building slowly and silently. That’s the kind of fear I’ve had about writing.

    Because writing—real writing—isn’t just performance. It’s not what you show them. It’s what leaks out in the spaces you don’t control. In the metaphors you didn’t mean to use. The slip of a memory. The softness in a sentence when you swore you were being strong. That’s the terror. That somehow, on a blank page, people will see you—unasked, unfiltered, unprepared.

    And I’ve been dodging that kind of exposure for a long time.

      You grow up learning to hide parts of yourself. In some neighborhoods, vulnerability is just another way to get hit—emotionally, spiritually, or with something less metaphorical. So you learn. You get good at it. You make armor out of silence and humor out of pain. You laugh loud enough to drown out the parts of yourself you don’t want heard.

      For me, it started early—ridiculed for being soft. For caring. For feeling things too deeply. Every time I let something slip, there was a consequence. Sometimes it was teasing. Sometimes it was loneliness. Over time, the message became clear: protect yourself.

    So I did. I built walls with intention. Not just to keep people out, but to keep something in—me.

      Lately, though, I’ve started letting people in. Not the whole crowd. Just a few. Just enough. You find someone you trust—maybe a friend who knows the shape of your silence—and you let them see a little more. A crack. A draft of warmth. Not a storm.

    But still, I worry.

      Because once the dam is broken, who controls the flood?

    That’s the thing about pain: it’s obedient until it isn’t.

    So I let it out in trickles. A sentence here. A sigh there. I’ve convinced myself that’s safer. That if the moment goes sideways, I can slam the valve shut and pretend like I never said anything at all.

    I’m curious if that’s preservation or cowardice. Or both.

      Sometimes, the isolation feels like a weighted blanket that won’t get off my chest. You carry the weight of your untold stories like overdue bills, knowing the interest is accumulating. You pretend you’re just private. But privacy, in excess, becomes starvation.

    You tell yourself you’re protecting yourself—but at what cost?

    When no one knows your whole name, who will mourn you properly?

      That’s the mess of it. Writing—this act of storytelling—isn’t always about catharsis. Sometimes it’s confrontation. Sometimes it’s putting a mirror to your own face and realizing you’ve spent years looking away. The stories we don’t tell are often the ones we most need to understand.

    I write now not because I want to be known, but because I’m starting to believe that parts of me are worth knowing.

    And if someone out there reads this and recognizes their own mask, their own silence, their own slow-burning rage and resignation—maybe we’ve both done something that matters.

      I don’t have answers. Just questions for the future.

    What happens when you open too much?

    What happens when you never open at all?

    Maybe the trick isn’t to dam the flood or drown in it—maybe it’s to learn to wade.

    Even if it means revealing that you bleed just like everyone else.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • Reclaiming the Family Table in a Digital World

    Reclaiming the Family Table in a Digital World

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Humanity Through Food Series

    There’s a particular kind of loneliness that only shows up when the room is full.

    The plates are set, the glasses sweating, conversation circling the table in half-sentences and faded memories. Someone laughs at a story you told five years ago. Someone else is reaching for the salt. And still, somehow, you feel like you’re eating alone.

    Because right there—between the fork and the folded napkin—sits the real guest of honor: the glowing screen.

    I’ve watched it happen more times than I care to admit.

    A table full of people I care about, people I don’t see nearly enough, and right as the food hits the table, the choreography begins.

    Not grace. Not a clinking of glasses.

    The camera roll.

    Phones are raised like tiny altars. Plates turn and rotate, bowls are angled just so, garnishes are nudged into the light. Someone stands up to get the “better angle.” Another person rearranges the dish itself—not to eat it, but to make it photogenic. I’ve watched steam rise and fade while people adjust filters.

    I’ve seen folks talk to their followers before they talk to the person sitting next to them.

    “Hold on, I just gotta post this real quick.”

    “Wait, don’t eat yet—I didn’t get the shot.”

    The food is right here, the people are right here, but we’re busy proving it to everyone who isn’t.

    We live in a world where the meal isn’t real until it’s posted. Where you can sit across from someone and still be miles away from them, because their attention is split into a hundred glowing fragments. They know what’s trending. They know who broke up, who clapped back, and who went viral. But ask them how their mother is doing or what they’ve truly been carrying this year, and suddenly there’s a silence you can’t blame on the Wi-Fi.

    It’s a strange thing: to be left alone inside a conversation that never actually stops.

    To share a meal and still feel like you were never really there.

    I grew up in a world where the table did quiet magic.

    The table was where you found out the truth.

    You learned who was mad at whom based on who passed the cornbread and who didn’t.

    You could measure the mood of the room by how the macaroni and cheese moved: whether it made it all the way around or stopped right in front of one person and stayed, like a confession. You heard about layoffs and breakups and diagnoses not through announcements, but through sighs and stories, passed around like side dishes.

    The table was both a surveillance and a sanctuary.

    You were seen there.

    You couldn’t hide—at least not entirely.

    Back then, if you were distant, somebody noticed.

    If you stared at your plate too long, someone asked, “Baby, you alright?”

    If you got quiet three dinners in a row, you had at least one aunt ready to corner you at the sink while washing dishes and say, “Tell me what’s really going on.”

    Now, you can sit at a table full of people and vanish in plain sight.

    All you have to do is look down.

    We call it “staying connected.”

    We tell ourselves we’re just checking something “real quick.”

    But the quickness stacks up. One check becomes ten. One notification becomes a thread. We leave the room without ever leaving our chairs.

    We say we don’t want to lose touch, but somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing who we were losing touch with.

    There’s a particular cruelty to the way the digital world replaces the slow work of getting to know people.

    Instead of asking, “How have you been?” we scroll.

    Instead of listening to how someone’s year cracked and healed, we skim their updates like headlines.

    We trade depth for highlights. We replace presence with proof.

    And there is always proof.

    Proof you were here, proof you ate well, proof you have people—whether or not you actually felt held by them.

    I’ve sat at tables where every story got interrupted by a ringtone.

    Where the joke doesn’t land because someone had to answer a text.

    Where the meal never quite settles into that deep, heavy rhythm—the one where everyone is finally full enough, comfortable enough, to let the truth slip out between bites.

    I’ve watched someone look more devastated by a low battery than by a friend’s confession.

    This is not just about etiquette.

    This is about what we’re willing to lose in the name of never missing out.

    The table used to be a place where we risked being known.

    Now it’s another backdrop.

    But here’s the thing: we’re not powerless in this.

    The digital world didn’t sneak into our homes through the foundation. We invited it in. We set the place for it. We laid out the napkin. We made room.

    Which means we can uninvite it, too—or at least ask it to wait its turn.

    I keep thinking about a small, almost silly rebellion:

    A stack of phones in the center of the table, all face down.

    No grand speeches.

    No self-righteous declarations about “screen time” or “kids these days.”

    Just a quiet, intentional act of reclaiming.

    You walk into the dining room, set your plate, and hug the people you haven’t seen in weeks or months. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you’re grieving. You may be just here because showing up feels easier than explaining why you didn’t.

    Before you sit down, you take your phone—the same device that holds your calendar, your playlists, your panic, your plausible deniability—and you place it in the middle of the table, face down. Everyone else does too. No buzzing on laps. No screens glowing beneath the table like secret altars. Just a small pile of surrendered attention.

    Not forever.

    Just for this meal.

    That stack becomes its own centerpiece.

    A reminder: we are here. Together. Right now.

    Without the screens, the room feels different. At first, it might feel awkward—like standing in a house after the power’s gone out. You can almost hear the absence of the digital hum. You look up and realize you’re making eye contact with people you haven’t really seen in months, even though you’ve “liked” every single update.

    You notice the way your cousin’s shoulders slump when she says work is “fine.”

    You hear the tremor in your friend’s voice when he talks about how the holidays feel different this year.

    You catch the way your father stares at an empty chair a moment too long.

    None of that would’ve made it into a caption.

    It doesn’t photograph well.

    But it’s the real meal.

    Reclaiming the family table in a digital world isn’t about pretending the internet doesn’t exist. It does, and it’s not going anywhere. Our recipes live there now. Our group chats. Our long-distance love stories and late-night confessions. Our survival has braided itself into those wires and signals.

    But the table—the real, physical table—does something the feed can’t.

    It holds the weight of us.

    It reminds us that people are not content.

    They are bodies and breath, nervous laughter and long pauses, second helpings and half-finished sentences. They are the way someone leans back in their chair when they’re finally relaxed, the way they push food around when they’re not okay, the way they reach for your hand without checking who’s watching.

    If we want to rebuild community in a culture addicted to elsewhere, we have to start by choosing here.

    Not every meal will be a breakthrough. Some nights, the best you can do is talk about nothing and pass the beans. That’s fine. Sacred, even. But when we stop curating our lives for people who aren’t in the room, we make space to notice the people who are.

    We make room for the slow, unglamorous work of knowing and being known.

    We make room for the kind of silence that isn’t empty, but safe.

    We make room for stories that don’t need hashtags to be real.

    Maybe the revolution isn’t dramatic.

    It could be a small family in a small kitchen, stacking their phones face down and picking up their forks. Maybe it’s a group of friends deciding that for one hour, they don’t need proof—only presence.

    Because the truth is, the table remembers us.

    Even when we forget ourselves.

    The chair still holds your shape after you leave.

    The plates still carry fingerprints.

    The air above the table holds the echo of your laughter, your arguments, your apologies.

    The digital world will always want another piece of you—another photo, another thought, another performance of your life. But the table wants something different.

    It wants you as you are: tired, hungry, complicated, half-healed, fully human.

    And that—no matter how advanced our screens become—is something no app can ever duplicate.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times