Time alone
February 23, 2010
Let me tell you something about the pervasiveness of loneliness. It looks for me in crowded places. It seeps in through the barricades of people and responsibility that I construct so painstakingly. It murmurs a cool kiss to my heart even when I hold your warm hands; it makes me look away and prepare to say that nothing's wrong.
"Nothing," I lie.
Nothing may not actually be a lie, perhaps it's just inaccurate. Maybe I don't know would be closer to the truth.
The thing is, you're totally alone, too. Didn't you ever think of that? Haven't you felt the cold, isolating squeeze of individuality? Haven't you ever seen yourself in the mirror, stopped, and mused:
Wow. There's everything there ever was and will be, wrapped up tight in my thin skin.
Because that is the reality, you know. You see, existence, experience, sensation; these are not things that we share. It's a kind of parallel play, what you and I are doing. You living in your universe, and I in mine. Playing along, side by side. When you take your last breath though, your universe collapses, and the only me that you could ever know dies there with it.
But I keep right along playing my little games. Until, at last, my tiny, fragile bubble bursts as well.
Tags for this piece: relationships friends love loneliness