There is a particular kind of quiet that comes with moving to a new city alone. Not the dramatic kind. The ordinary kind. The kind where you know exactly how your coffee order comes out and exactly which grocery aisle stocks your favourite pasta, but you could not tell anyone in this city your last name, because nobody has asked yet.
I have been in Melbourne a few months now, still finding my feet in a studio apartment with a kitchen just about big enough for one, still working out which tram gets me where I need to go. So when I was invited to dine at Bonnibel, the ground floor restaurant at the newly opened lyf on Elizabeth Melbourne, in the lead up to International Friendship Day on 30 July, I said yes before I had even checked what the dress code was. Not for the meal, though the meal turned out to be wonderful. I said yes because the invitation itself felt like exactly the kind of small, deliberate act of connection I had been quietly missing.
A letter before the meal: Before anyone touched a fork, we were handed something far less expected than a menu, a blank sheet of paper. The evening was hosted in partnership with Friends for Good, Australia’s first charity dedicated solely to combating loneliness, and our guest of honour for the night was Antoine Pace, the organisation’s Chair and a Melbourne lawyer who has spent years advocating for people experiencing isolation. Before we broke bread, Antoine set us a task. Write a letter, he said, to someone you cherish most.
Simple enough, until you actually pick up the pen.
I found myself writing to two people at once. One I had genuinely lost, someone who mattered enormously and is no longer reachable in the way they once were. And one I have not met yet, a friend still waiting somewhere out there in this city I am only beginning to learn. Here is a small piece of what I wrote.
“I don’t know your name yet, and that is the strange part of writing to you. I know you exist somewhere in this city, in a queue at a cafe I haven’t found, on a tram I haven’t caught yet, at a table I haven’t been seated at. I am not writing to remember you, because there is nothing to remember. I am writing so that when we do finally meet, I will already know how much I have been looking forward to it.”
Reading it back, it felt less like nostalgia and more like an admission. That loneliness, when you are honest about it, is rarely about the people you have lost. It is just as often about the people you have not yet let in.
Friends for Good was founded in 2016 as Australia’s first not for profit built specifically around loneliness, rather than treating it as a footnote to mental health or ageing. Their flagship service, FriendLine, is a free and anonymous phone line where anyone in the country can call and simply talk to a volunteer, no referral, no waiting list, no diagnosis required. Beyond the phone line, the charity runs community education workshops on topics ranging from identifying loneliness in the workplace to tackling it in aged care, hosts an annual symposium bringing researchers and lived experience together, and has recently launched the Australian Loneliness Research Foundation to build a genuinely local body of evidence on an issue that, by their own research, touches roughly nine in ten Australians at some point in their lives.
What struck me most was how unsentimental Antoine was about it all. He did not frame loneliness as a personal failing or something to be embarrassed about. He framed it as a design problem, a gap in how our cities and routines are built, and something we can actively counter with small, repeatable acts. A letter. A phone call. A hello.
Staying in your lane is easy. It is also a trap.
Moving somewhere new hands you a very convenient excuse to keep to yourself. You already have a legitimate reason to eat alone, to skip the group activity, to put off joining the local running club or the pottery class or whatever it is that keeps nagging at the back of your mind. Nobody questions it. You are new, after all.
But sitting at Bonnibel that evening, surrounded by people I had never met, all of us having just handed over a genuinely vulnerable piece of writing to a stranger, I kept coming back to a fairly blunt question. What is the actual quality of a life spent entirely in your own lane? A smile you do not offer costs you nothing to withhold, and gains you nothing either. A compliment you keep to yourself protects you from precisely zero embarrassment and connects you to precisely zero people. The chance to join a community built around a shared interest, whether that is a running crew, a book club or a Tuesday night trivia table, only ever costs you the small discomfort of walking in not knowing anyone. That is a fairly reasonable price for a friend.
What a brand like lyf is actually trying to teach you
This is where lyf’s design philosophy makes more sense than it might on paper. lyf on Elizabeth Melbourne is built around the idea of social living rather than simply a place to sleep, with flexible shared spaces, an in house programme of local activations under its #liveyourfreedom banner, and staff known as lyf guards who are there to connect guests with each other as much as with the neighbourhood. It occupies a heritage building on Elizabeth Street that was originally a YWCA hostel back in 1975, which feels almost too fitting, a building with community written into its foundations, now doing the same job under a new name.
Travelling or relocating for work often strips away your existing social scaffolding in one go. What a coliving concept like lyf is quietly betting on is that most people, given a shared lounge, a communal table or a curated local event, will take the opportunity to talk to the stranger next to them, provided somebody designs a low pressure reason to do so. It is the same principle Antoine was getting at with the letter writing exercise. People rarely need convincing that connection matters. They mostly need a nudge, and a bit of structure, to actually go and do it.
The neighbour who climbed onto my balcony
I will admit I needed that lesson delivered to me directly, because I very nearly missed it entirely in my own building. A few weeks after I moved in, there was a knock on my door. A woman I had never seen before, clearly a little flustered, explained she was my next door neighbour and had just locked herself out, keys sitting on her kitchen counter, mocking her through the window. Our balconies, as it turned out, are connected. Without much more discussion than “would you mind”, she hopped over the railing between our two balconies, let herself back into her own apartment through the sliding door, and disappeared with a wave.
I assumed that was the entire encounter. Ten minutes later there was another knock. Same woman, considerably less flustered this time, keys firmly in hand. “Hi, I’m your neighbour,” she said, as though we had not just shared a mildly ridiculous piece of amateur balcony acrobatics. We introduced ourselves properly. We have said hello in the hallway every time since.
It is a small, slightly absurd story, but it is the clearest example I have of exactly what Antoine and Friends for Good were getting at over dinner. Connection rarely announces itself with an invitation and a dress code. Sometimes it turns up locked out of its own apartment and asks to use your balcony.
International Friendship Day falls on 30 July, and if this year’s edition of it happened to involve a beautifully plated dinner at Bonnibel, a room full of new faces and a genuinely moving conversation with the Chair of a national loneliness charity, then I will happily take it. But the actual takeaway travels well beyond one dinner in one hotel.
Write the letter. Take the balcony. Say hello to the stranger in the queue. Whoever it is on the other end of that letter I wrote, met or not yet met, lost or still to be found, I suspect they are simply waiting for someone to go first.
Bonnibel @ lyf on Elizabeth Melbourne
489 Elizabeth St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
T: +61 (03) 9660 5403 | E: bonnibel@the-ascott.com
