What Does Loneliness Mean To You?
It occurred to me when I followed a trail down Saurabh Garg‘s Instagram Stories. He writes of the isolation of chasing material dreams. His friend who saw the same view spoke of a wineglass on a window sill. Me? I saw exquisite poetry laced with slivers of pain.
Loneliness. To my dear Libran friend here, it means staring into the abyss between a fairytale & reality. He tagged it #modernlove. To me that’s poetic. Of Kahlil Gibran saying “to know the pain of too much tenderness”.
I have not been lonely this week. Between flashback encounters, throwback conversations & a rollercoaster of clashing feelings, there has been a crowd in my mind. It’s noisy, smoky, murky. I spent yesterday in a recap of my 20s or ‘the 20s I should have had’. It was an evening to climax days of opulent company.
These days have been paced with solo dates, walks on my own, chats with trees, sessions of staring at the sky, breathing my plants, watching over homecooked food. I’m not going to glamorise it. It’s when I patiently untangle my feelings, scrub out residual thoughts, collect stray ideas. I also indulge in what-ifs & entertain alternate realities where I am a different me – one that villifies those adjacent to my pain without thought of culpability, one that slays demons instead of treating them with compassion, one that does battle with the violent instead of offering up reason. I hurt myself & then there are lessons & rewards at the end of it, not the least of all, achievement & healing. I need my lonely.
Loneliness to me is a chance to savour what grows within & craft the me I want to be, free of interference. This even means realising that different people understand loneliness differently and that means they offer up their love when they want to accompany you or see you coupled up (even if you don’t want that). Loneliness lets me love them back for the effort even if they’ll never understand it. This is my pain of too much tenderness. The vertigo that isn’t a fear of heights but a desire to fall.What does loneliness mean to you?
