"Overcoming Loneliness In Everyday Life"

I woke up in the dark, suddenly aware of a presence in the room. The book slided and thudded heavily to the floor in a flurry of pages.

"Go out and hunt." he remarked, standing over me.

"If you think it's too troublesome for you to---" I managed stiffly before he laughed.

"No. What I meant was you need something to occupy your time."

I said nothing and leaned down to pick up my book.

When I looked up, he was gone.

It was 3 am in the morning. He had left it in the fridge, as usual.

"Loneliness seems to occur regularly when emotional life is unshared. Loneliness appears to be a quite normal signal of an emotionally unsatisfactory state, the state of being without emotional partnerships. Why humans should be so constituted is unclear, but it might be surmised that in the evolution of the human organism, loneliness ... acts to protect our bonds with larger social groups, connections ... important to human survival and development..."

I had picked up the book at the library sale at Suntec. Half of Singapore was there, it seemed. Bargains call to the blood of the ordinary Singaporean. The title was lying half covered by a 2001 edition of Java Programming. I waited for the girl beside me to turn away, before I slided it free from the heap to slip it under the stack of books I was holding.

The book was a study on the condition of loneliness by two psychiatrists. Society, they argued, has fostered individual independence to the point that people feel themselves obliged to nobody. They quote from As de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century:

"Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their own destiny is in their hands... each man is forever thrown back on himself alone and there is the danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."

Vampires are lone creatures out of necessity.

"Too many unexplained cases in an area," he once said, "and you run the risk of discovery. They can be your neighbours, your colleagues and your friends, but they can turn on you once they know you. Never forget that."

Vampires, I thought, are too busy in the struggle for survival to feel lonely.