Loneliness
I am sad today. Very sad. I am lonely yet again. I sit alone in my unnecessarily and wastefully large apartment, which seems even more so today. The silence is broken only by the sporadic typing on my keyboard and the incessant ticking of the clock on the wall. An occasional car on the street claims to create some noise around me. Yet it is the silence that is deafening.
The simple pleasures of life are the hardest to come by. My mom cooking in the kitchen. My dad reading a book in the living room. S surfing in the study room. I flit and float across the three rooms, happy that the three people I love the most in this whole wide world are under the same roof. And I dont have to worry about them. I know how they are and where they are and I can talk to them, without worrying about the IDD charges or the time zones. In my life, this is a rarity. Almost like once in a blue moon. When it happens, it lasts a day or two. And today, they are all gone again. Back to their own lives.
“Loneliness has always been a friend of mine”. I am too old to listen to Backstreet Boys, yet that line always seems like it was written just for me. But today, even the loneliness is not a comforting friend. He is upset that I had ignored him for the last two days. It takes a while to pacify my oldest friend and remind him yet again that all my life I have always come back to being alone. And that I will eventually find happiness in being alone. And then somehow that pact will be broken again, when people walk in and out of my life. Like there are no doorbells they need to ring. I love them, and I miss them. I understand why they have to leave, but it doesn’t make it any easier. I am angry at the world and at my life. No matter how fast I run, I just never seem to reach my destination. The closer I get to people, the farther they seem to move away.
Tears are flowing down my eyes. I move the keyboard away so that it wont get into the spaces between the keys and ruin the internals. Other than that, it could hurt no one else. Coz theres no one else to know. And there seems no particular gain in wiping my eyes or in trying to stop the tears. So I let it be.
Dont feel sorry for me. Self-pity deserves nothing from anyone but myself, not even the time you took to read this. And from me, I take the time off to recognise that I am sad. That I am not addicted to loneliness. And to remind myself that I am not a loner by choice and thus not a freak.
Now that that deed is done, I get back to do the many things that I have to do and love to do. And then I forget to be sad.
Guess all of us feel like this at some stage of our lives. But remember that “Friends are strangers waiting to be met”..Possibly the Dutch weather at this time of year is also a major contributor !! (dark when you go to work, dark when you come back from work!!)
Ashenden
Comment by Anonymous — October 26, 2005 @ 12:47 pm
Thanks, Ashenden! =)
Comment by Sue — October 26, 2005 @ 11:57 pm
Hi Sue
I’m sorry that you were feeling bad on this day.
I find that the blogosphere is a kind of meeting place where I never feel all that lonely. The blogs that I read are all written by people who I have known for a while and they sometimes comment on my blog and, if they have comments, I sometimes comment on theirs. So the on-line world doesn’t seem so lonely to me. But it might to others who really require the face to face meeting.
Comment by Michael H. — October 27, 2005 @ 9:25 am
People can be addicted to being alone, not to loneliness. Only a misanthropist would fit the loneliness addict description.
Just commenting for the sake of letting you know that I’m still visiting - so keep writing.
:)
Comment by surreal reality — October 27, 2005 @ 5:48 pm
Thanks, Michael =) Hopefully I will make some friends on the blogosphere too! And welcome to my Dutch Diary!
Comment by Sue — October 27, 2005 @ 11:20 pm
Hi surreal reality! Good to see you around.
Am reading Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf these days and being addicted to loneliness doesn’t seem such an impossibility. Of course, I tend to exaggerate =)
Comment by Sue — October 27, 2005 @ 11:24 pm