An Infestation of Mind and Decision

2001.11.15

Loneliness, you have taken me once again… crushing the life from my body and crucifying all the hopes I have built upon my shoulders. I wish I could let you in to experience what it is like for me to have these emotions. It’s like falling unexpectedly and having the wind knocked out of you… the gasping for air… the feeling that you are going to die… the fading eyesight and distant voices. That’s the closest analogy that I can create for you… and it’s still not perfect… not like you, loneliness. You are the ultimate death. You are the darkness in the light. You are the shadow that dreams for night. That is when you can move without being seen… and you can become anything you want to be. You can be the lost Love of a pure romantic. You can be the dead mother of an only child. You can be the empty chair at a birthday dinner. You can be all these and more.

 

I have been lost in you. To me you ARE the night. You are the silence. You are the creaks in my apartment, the cracks in the floorboards that fill with the dust of non-movement. You are the long hours of staring out the windows and watching life pass by on the streets below. The moments in time when time no longer exists… or when it takes on the form of a crouching tiger… waiting outside the door of my apartment… waiting for me to get up the courage to venture outside. It’s out there, where I feel your presence at its most divine. I feel more alone when surrounded by people. Enveloped by friends and family becomes the most terrifying and unnerving experience, and it becomes a time when I try to escape myself. I withdraw inside and hide from their laughter and questioning stares. I want to wrap myself in a sphere of stainless steel… I want to build a wall from my hate so nobody can see who I am. I want to keep everyone and everything away from me… I need to be sterile… I need to find myself inside this emptiness. I need to escape myself… and escape the thoughts of the past. Dante said it best when he wrote “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” I need to escape the thought of the one who introduced me to you.

 

But you won’t leave me alone. Loneliness. You are always there to remind me that I cannot exist inside my self-hatred. You speak to me through tormented dreams and broken movements in the putrid air. I grow my nails long and file them to razor-sharp points for protection from you… but I use them on myself, to stay awake… I cannot let you take me. I have to wait inside this nightmare. I have to wait here because I have a feeling that there is something missing. So, scarred and scared, I hide behind locked doors… waiting for her to find me… but she never comes. Maybe she’s lost… maybe she’s scared… maybe she doesn’t care… maybe she never has. Nevertheless, I wait here, loneliness by my side, a dagger in my back… I cannot lie down… I cannot sleep… I cannot cry… or I will be beaten.