♫ ♪ What is there to do, but to fall in love with you,
sleeping on your chest, in the middle of the night,
telling you my secrets, whispering my dreams,
wrapped up in your arms to hold me tight. ♫ ♪
Loneliness and being alone are two entirely separate things. I’m sure most people know this, but you’re here reading what I’m rambling, so I don’t think you’d mind if I write it out anyway.
I like being alone. I enjoy being by myself. I enjoy my company. I’m quiet, contemplative, and at peace with myself, for the most part, in that I don’t get in my own way. It’s a pleasurable thing to like your own company, and I understand that not everyone experiences being alone in that way.
On the other hand, being lonely, experiencing loneliness, is sheer soul torture. It is the shredding of every good and wonderful thing in your heart, the burning of your brain, the squeezing of the air in your lungs until you can’t breathe, the coldest wind icing its way through your bones, and it is the most silent echo of a pleading voice you will never hear.
Drama much.
Still true.
Loneliness is a killer. It is the destroyer of good health, good spirits, and peace. There is nothing beneficial from loneliness, and as I said I consider it a form of torture. To force loneliness on someone is to steal the very blood from their body. It is a sentence that can take years to recover from, regardless how relatively short that sentence, and I look upon anyone who enjoys to force people into loneliness as not only evil, but worthy of punishment on its own.
I have experienced a lot of loneliness in my life. Not just days or weeks, but months, years, decades of loneliness. Even if things were to change, if my fortunes were to suddenly shift and I found myself within the presence of someone who loved me and filled my life with their company, the memory of that loneliness would stay with me, just as someone put in extended solitary confinement would still feel the effects of it years after the fact.
We know, as a society, that loneliness kills. We know it destroys hearts and minds. In the US, we have a culture of loneliness and isolation, so it’s no wonder things look as bat shit as they have been, because we’ve all become disassociated from one another, we’ve all started seeing other people as strangers and as a result we treat each other as strangers.
“Red, is this about capitalism?”
All things are about capitalism, except this. But also this.
It’s like walking through a waking nightmare, and I’m not sure what can be done about it. The problems are systemic, but it’s each one of us who takes the brunt of that torture. We’re experiencing it and it’s crushing every part of us, and just destroying our already short lives.
Honestly, if someone walked up to me, hugged me, kissed me on the forehead, and said I’m glad you’re here, I’d probably break down in tears. The touch from a hand, putting their head on my shoulder, putting their arms around me, lying across my legs while they’re reading, a gentle kiss.
Why must these things be denied not only to me, but to so many others? We’re pushed away from each other by circumstance, by disability, by economic status, and we’re expected to somehow survive as thinking, feeling, rational human beings?
The system is cruel. It is abusive. We deserve better. All of us. We should have the right to be alone when necessary, but we should never have to be lonely again.
.Red
