Loneliness

Loneliness is the hardest pill to swallow no matter what way you look at it. The worst thing about loneliness is that you would give anything for a crumb of comfort. Perhaps it's the feel of flesh upon flesh a powerful carnal need, maybe it's companionship through means of intoxication. Whatever it is, people all try to avoid it and struggle to find some scrap of peace amidst the turmoil. What is sad is any feelings fleeting, the leave just as quickly as they come. I mean there is only a small level of comfort a person can find in the arms of another. The comfort must first come from within. The need to feel something, to feel anything in fact is a need, a most basic instinct, a hunger that is never satisfied.

Someone once said "It is cruel that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom, the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and the everlasting beauty of monotony."  And really he was right; music, lyrics, and beats they all take away the sting of the emotion but in real life the emotions suck. 

Do you even know what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely people themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion of a time where they didn't feel so alone. The funny thing is you can be surrounded by people and it doesn't even make a difference because when it comes down to it some part of you inside is still clinging to the ideal of what not being alone should feel like.

Loneliness is the ten-year-old girl, pasting herself against the outside wall of a concrete school building at recess, hoping the bell would ring so she can go inside where her desk awaits her. In the classroom it wouldn’t be so obvious that she’s alone as it is when she’s outside on the crowded playground.

But that's not all it is; loneliness is the 16 year old boy who's been waiting for ten years for his father to come back, only to watch him walk away. As his father walks away his mother directs her yells at him for making his father leave not once but twice, a constant remind that he is unwanted, unloved and unimportant. It’s the family that constantly berates him for being a disappointment and the silence he hears most in a crowded room. The feeling of not belonging and of the girl that walked away and didn't look back, the friends that turned the other cheek, the beatings that rained down like furniture during the worst hurricane.

Loneliness forces a person to find comfort wherever it is offered, it forces a person to accept less than they deserve and fall into a lie. Loneliness makes us weak; it makes it hard to look in the mirror. It turns sleep into nothing but a dream you are chasing; it takes away everything. The unfortunate things is, all you need is someone other than yourself try to convince you that everything is going to be okay, and it is... Until it isn't again. 

So why all the pretence? Why smile when inside you are crying? Why laugh when it hurts inside? Because, loneliness is a weakness. And you, can not be weak, so smile until your cheeks hurt. Laugh until everyone believes it and lie because hopefully the next time you say 'I'm okay' you'll mean it.

xx