Recently, I’ve been calling my friends from home, talking to them a lot about loneliness. This holiday season was my first without having my parents or close friends nearby. Although 2020 marks the start of my first full year in St. Louis, it’s also my first year being over four hundred miles away from family. My cell phone calls to Indiana and Michigan are the closest I get to genuine interactions with my loved ones as I continue to meet new people and develop deeper friendships where I am. In all of this, you could say my loneliness is a form of grief: the grief of losing what and who I grew up with.
