The Opposite of Loneliness - Label

Marina Keegan (Yale Class of 2012) was 22 years old when she wrote her essay “The Opposite of Loneliness” for a special 2012 commencement edition of the Yale Daily News. Tragically, Marina died in a car accident just days after commencement. Yet, the memory of her spirit and the legacy of her beautiful prose live on in her written works, shared both via the print and online editions of the News as well as a collection of her essays, poems, and stories published by her parents in 2014.

I first encountered “The Opposite of Loneliness” in high school. Although she writes specifically to a Yale audience, Marina’s words burrowed into my mind for days, weeks, months after I read them. She captures so eloquently feelings which I had felt but could not name: that feeling of comfort, safety, and warmth found in relationship and company with others – that opposite of loneliness. Marina writes: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”

Inspired, I described my reactions to her essay in a letter I wrote to her in 2016 for a contest called Letters About Literature. There, I told her: “Thank you, Marina, for giving me the hope, inspiration, and determination to become the writer I one day hope to be.” Marina’s words can speak to all of us, for no matter where we are in life, we all long for that “opposite of loneliness.”