limerence.

𝘼 𝙎𝙊𝙉𝙂 𝘼 𝘿𝘼𝙔 𝙆𝙀𝙀𝙋𝙎 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝘿𝙀𝙋𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙎𝙄𝙊𝙉 𝘼𝙒𝘼𝙔

I've been trying for awhile
to accurately describe the feeling of loneliness. Each time it feels like I'm missing something. I never come close enough. It's a tricky one. It's not as expressive as sadness is. Doesn't gut you, slice you open the way grief does. Loneliness works differently. It doesn't slap you in the face like anger or jealously. It takes time penetrating your life. You ever have a friend that you didn't particularly like? You don't know how you became friends. It seems like they've always been around. Not sure why. Not sure the moment they went from stranger to a contact in your phone. Loneliness is like that. Yeah, like an invader that moved so slowly, you didn't even notice.

I guess it just sits there,
like some bruise that's so close to being healed. Sometimes you think it's gone. If you stay distracted, plugged in, never fully present, you might not feel it at all. But like a bruise, if you touch it you'll wince. You'll be reminded it's still there. In my experience, loneliness rarely has to to do with being alone. Sure, that might amplify it, but it's never the root cause.

Loneliness
shows up when you forget yourself. It's present on the nights you feel like a stranger in your own body and you wonder how long you've been on autopilot. On those nights, you'll ask yourself, "have I always been this lonely?" When it becomes too much, on the bad nights, you'll look for immediate distractions. We're good at that, us humans.

We've figured out
how to be so plugged in all the time. We'll numb ourselves with food or alcohol or superficial connection. We'll text someone we shouldn't. We'll binge watch shows on Netflix until the screen is forced to ask, "are you still watching?" On those nights, you'll hate admitting just how lonely you really are.

It feels like a failure of sorts.
Because loneliness, unlike sadness or anger, is harder to figure out. Why do we feel this way? How can we fix it? I'm still not sure I know the answers to those questions, but I do know loneliness does not go away if you just ignore it.

It sits.
It waits. It stays tucked away for the next bad night. The next night you lower your defences.
Perhaps there is a feeling of unity in our loneliness. That even in our most isolated, in our pangs of pure lonely, we can know that others are feeling that way too. Maybe we should talk more of our loneliness. Maybe that's how we take it's power away.

We share,
we grieve together, we try to understand this feeling. I wonder how many of us are hurting right now. I wonder how many of us are afraid to let the world know just how lonely these nights can be.

Sometimes
I feel like ripping apart my skin and searching for a reason why I feel the way I do. So empty. Maybe my veins are tangled, or maybe something is lodged in my rib cage. Because it feels like something inside of me is missing or broken and I would give all the money in the world to find that missing piece.

I'm lonely
and I don't know how to make it sound like poetry anymore. It's just that I used to fall into friendships. It's just that most days I want to fall into my bed or my grave and these bones are too fragile for show and tell and I'm like a storm on open seas with worse mental health and I don't want anyone to look at me except that I want everyone to look at me and I don't know what to say I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to anyone anyway, after all, no one ever really listens.

Loneliness;
I don't like it. It destroys me, but I can't stop it from coming. Sometimes it makes the night air smell better, but most of the time there's this emptiness that's waiting to be filled with something. And I always feel like that something is self-love. And sometimes self-love is being alone doing the things that make me become more of who I really am while the self-destructive thoughts are buzzing, humming till' they pass by dawn. And sometimes self-love is noticing myself falling apart and embracing life's nothingness. And sometimes, oh, sometimes self-love is finding meaning in my loneliness. And sometimes self-love is everything.