The Shape of Loneliness – One Shot Story

Taken in Boston, January 2011 with the Minolta 500mm f/8 reflex on my Alpha 9. At this focal length, even ordinary things become intriguing. It’s a perspective I don’t have with my naked eyes.

But of course, this one shot story has literally nothing to do with photography.

A girl I used to know once looked through a bunch of my photos. She closed the laptop and sighed. They all felt so freaking sad, she said, lonely and depressive. Luckily, we became physically intimate and went our separate ways before she started worrying about my mental health.

More than ten years later, I showed a collection of my recent photos to ChatGPT, a masterpiece of human technology designed to simulate human thoughts. Not too surprisingly, the keywords it gave me were loneliness, silence, emptiness, and being forgotten.

I started wondering what shaped that loneliness.

Though I knew it never came from a lack of relationships.

I’ve run a small business in rural Tasmania for a few years. Some of my young staff, around sixteen or seventeen, found partners early and stayed with them. One even preparing for marriage. I joked with them, ‘This is nothing like my generation.’

My generation of East Asian Millennials was different. It felt like a wave of sexual liberation had swept through our culture, not unlike what the baby boomers experienced in the West. We dated strangers online and met them the same evening, starting things quickly and ending them just as fast. A ‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend’ could mean anything. A month, or just a night. Marriage felt far away, if not irrelevant.

Right before my own marriage, I wrote a story about the past relationships that left a mark on me. I coded each one with a letter and realized I had gone from A to Z.

That abundance didn’t help. The idea of an ‘ideal match’ grew more vague.

Even when I thought I had found the one, coded as the letter T in my story, someone so close that she could finish my sentences, the relationship couldn’t last. We were too idealistic. When the reality of our differences surfaced, we couldn’t accept it. We were both in love with the one that only existed in fantasy.

It reminded me of a Japanese novel I once read, Almost Transparent Blue. It follows a group of young people drifting in a haze of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. The story was so decadent, I was desperate to experience the same, if only I had the chance. I longed for that chaos, but I already knew: Beneath it all was something hollow, and what remains in the end is just loneliness.

Share this post: