Lord Huron’s “Is There Anybody Out There”

I entered this year craving deep solitude.

It spurred my decision to leave Toronto, reaching for subsistence in a less-populated city where I wouldn’t face such a high risk of reinfection when navigating public spaces. It also became what I needed to grieve—a stillness and seclusion so profound I could finally process all the changes I’d weathered, like waiting for the ringing hum of tinnitus to fade after a bomb blast.

As I’ve written before, developing a chronic illness as confusing as long covid, wherein most doctors don’t spend time trying to understand it so patients receive little to no medical support, is hard enough. But developing long covid at a time when covid continues to spread unchecked because most people have been told it’s “just a cold” is crazy making. Nearly every week brings a new study proving otherwise, another item added to the long list of grim health effects. Avoiding reinfection is something we should all care about because we’re all being affected by this endless spread.

Yet, the farther out we get from 2020, the harder it gets. For most people, the pandemic ended in 2022 when Joe Biden declared it over. Uh huh. It’s so over that people can still catch covid 2-3 times a year, each infection impairing their cognition to some extent, accelerating their body’s aging, and damaging their immune system for at least 20 months. That’s what covid will always do. On top of that exists the Russian-roulette gamble: every infection also increases your risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and long covid. In children, long covid risk doubles by their second infection.

Why do we not care about this? Because it would take actual effort to address? To clean indoor air, ask people to mask in high-transmission areas like airports, invest in robust testing to keep information accessible, and pay people to stay home when they’re sick? Thanks to covid, we are on track to lead shorter, less-healthy lives, with more and more people becoming disabled by long covid or from the co-infections they will acquire as their immune system fails to fight off new harms.

This moment in history shares much in common with the discovery that cigarettes cause cancer. Back then, doctors alleviated fears by dismissing the reports. But eventually the facts became too conclusive. Will it take us decades to take covid seriously, too? Will we get to that moment at all when we live with the existential threat of climate change and still do nothing to alter our behaviors to reach a different outcome?

So yeah, I retreated. I called it hibernating. I moved to the Hudson Valley and I stopped trying to interact with anyone who wasn’t invested in some kind of prevention. The people cosplaying that everything is back to normal? No thanks. We truly live in two different realities and it hurts to spend time in that world because it involves so much denial.

One song came to embody this sense of solitude turned isolation: Lord Huron’s “Is There Anybody Out There,” off their latest album The Cosmic Selector, Vol. 1. Lead singer Ben Schneider addresses the title’s central question to a universe that has yet to lead him to his soulmate. Alone and longing, he pines for connection: “I’ve been looking a long time/ What’s your name? Am I ever gonna find you?” he sings, reverb surrounding his voice like the soft glow of candlelight pressing against the dark.

Schneider is looking for love, but in the song’s radio transmission, shot out into the swirling galaxy, I heard my own situation spent warning people I loved who inhabited that “other reality”: “I’ve been talking a long time/ Hope my message will find an ear.” The song’s opening tempo spins fluidly like satellites whirling overhead. As I listen to it, I imagine myself by the lake I love so well, my neck craned to watch the stars, only to witness endless satellites moving among them—a technology competing with the messages from centuries ago, a new form of light pollution. With so much signal noise, how can any meaningful dispatch cut through?

My favorite moment of the song comes at 3:12, when Schneider capsizes into despair. “I’m alone in this place,” he laments, holding the word “alone” with charred sustain that elevates the plainness of the C chord he’s singing into something heartfelt and true. It is so hard to be alone in this, missing the connections I had with friends and extended family past but no longer knowing how to maintain those relationships when the reality of this moment goes unheeded.

Still, as the year ends and I sit beside the campfire ash of all I’ve burned away, I feel my desire to be alone slowly waning. I just can’t see a way forward yet. I can’t imagine opening back up to those who don’t live with the reality of covid, but the alternative is so small: a few people who care. And maybe that should be enough but I find myself yearning for something more. People who already get it and new ones who are willing to try. As I post this on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, I’m hoping all of this darkness begins to give way to fresh light. Schneider sings it perfectly near the end, “Maybe someone will find me/ I’ll be waiting right here.”

If you’ve made it to the end of this post and feel compelled to integrate more covid safety into your routine to keep vulnerable populations safe, it’s never too late to start masking again. Please consider wearing a well-fitting respirator when you go to the grocery store, a doctor’s office, and the airport.