There is a difference between being lonely and being alone.
Lonely gets down in your bones. Lonely is that feeling that tells you it’s empty, it’s over, it’s all meaningless, and it always was. Lonely isn’t a feeling at all, it is the absence of feeling, it is that achy nothing that sits between your ribcage and your spine just chewing a little hole in the space that holds the air and blood and replacing it with a little pocket full of nothing. Lonely is getting up and knowing that no one will miss you today, no one will think of you today in just that way, that however much you are loved in a high esoteric platonic sense, no one is thumping in their soul for you today and probably not tomorrow either.
Lonely can be claustrophobic, it can be that sense that you start crying and ain’t nobody gonna come fix it. That you can just sit there crying in your bed and no one is going to come for comfort and there’s nobody who could provide that comfort even if you cried out and they came running somehow. It is the empty light absent feeling on the left hand, second finger in from the abyss, how that is so much harder to get used to than the weight and encirclement ever was. It is the sinking feeling in the dark of night and in the dawn of day that tomorrow or this will be a day of contact without connection, of emotion without feeling, of missing and not being missed. The kind of feeling that one didn’t even know one could miss because it was so full and free, that there would always always always be one person in the world who gave a shit, who cared more than anything, and lonely is that person’s indifference, the indifference of the wind, of caprice, of a world without a face.
Lonely is enhanced and hardened by not being alone, by being surrounded in groups and among pairs, of being besieged by the freneticism of community only to have it wash up on the shores of one day or the next suddenly unplanned, unscheduled, free to let lonely swoop down like a bird of prey and snatch you out of the water and leave you hooked and gasping. How you flail and resist for a while, then go limp, dead numb, knowing that lonely’s got you and won’t let you go till you find some other environs that can distract you from your true state again. And you can call out and you can remember God and you can say hey God, you and me, we got this, but God won’t give you a hug because that is not in God’s nature. And God says you and lonely, you got this too, and you have to get cozy and friendly and romantic with lonely because that’s all you got. And God is wise but God is not going to save anyone from anything, least of all lonely, because lonely is the way of the world.
Lonely is wondering, lonely is wandering, lonely is knowing that it doesn’t matter if you pick up the book or turn on the computer or put on the movie or amble outside, lonely is patient and persistent and will be waiting for you behind whatever veil you try to put up. Lonely can be like a blanket, maybe not sopping wet, but sort of ragged and flearidden and vaguely mildewy, it offers a sad smelly sort of comfort, like this is your shit and you might as well lie in it because no one else will. And you lie there, sort of settling in, because you know this blanket and you gave it its flaws and you could no more run out into the street waving the blanket around and attract the right kind of attention than you could repair it to new. And in that, in the blanket’s adaptation, its confirmation to your body and skin, there is a softness, a tearful kind of softness that pads the harshness of the empty ache and the light finger and the inability of anything to enclose you enough.
Lonely is a dog whining and wheezing at your heels. It is a single bird squawking for the flock in separation as night draws near. It is the muffled sobbing of your own breath as you try to figure out what you did to deserve this. Lonely doesn’t mean to be cruel, doesn’t mean to judge, it just sits there biding its time in mild indifference, slowly kneading into your chest with infinitely incremental additions of force. You could almost get used to it, but one day you wake up and your torso has collapsed.
And it’s hard to walk around without a torso.
