Back to the Beginning Again

There seems to be a pattern in my life. It goes like this:

A day of happiness
Years of loneliness
A day of happiness
Years of loneliness

But the day of happiness is only illusion amidst the loneliness and I know it. But for just one day, I let myself believe, in spite of everything, just to feel it again because I always forget, that perhaps I won't be lonely my entire life. There are crowds of laughing voices in hallways and on the streets and they smile at me and talk to me and like me. But they don't know me and I don't know them and I still haven't begun to find that immediate connection that lets me know that someone understands.

I'm not talking about sympathy or empathy, but experiencing along with. The kind of experience that takes it all back and puts the day of happiness back in the loneliness and makes the loneliness disappear. I found it once and now it's far away, and I don't know if their experience was loneliness or something else...or just me happening upon them in life.

This fate is inevitable and I've known it for a very long time. Who can know a writer who lives more in her words and fantasies for the sake of the all who can never know her, for the prick of a finger and the drop of blood that shapes reality into what they all want it to be. They seek respite for a moment and find it in her work, then put it down, turn away, think about it or not and she goes on, finding another piece of dream for them and they never quite know the energy involved.

The way I work is generally like this now: I lay myself bare for everyone to see. If it scares them, they run away. If it intrigues them, they look a little more. If it haunts them, they never go away. But if they fall in love with it, they know that bare skin is still just the surface and doesn't even begin to tell the story; but oftentimes nakedness frightens people off without them even knowing it, or they get bored, because skin is only skin and it's all mostly the same. If I could give them all a knife capable of ripping it all away, I would. But the bearers of the blade that can cut through to me are scarce and maybe I've already found them all.

So for now, I must live, lonely again, like I know I should. I know I'll come home every night to an empty space. I know I'll cry because distance separates me from my friends. And I know cry again because there's distance now to separate me when there used to be all the space in the universe and nothing on the other side. Is it worse, I ask, to long for what you miss or to long for what you've never had? Both are the sustenance of desperation. Desperation is the destiny of the lonely--both in practice and in theory, because we never truly know what we're despairing for.