Every relationship starts with loneliness.
We made friends at school because we didn't want to play alone at recess. From a young age, we are taught that toys are meant to be shared and learned that they were always more fun that way anyway.
Couples think about having two or three kids because they don't want them to grow up lonely. Only children sometimes feel like they missed out on a big part of life because they don't have siblings. I'm not saying they all felt neglect, but that they know their childhood would probably have been a lot different if they had had a brother or sister.
By the time you're thirteen and your body starts changing, your mind starts changing too. Suddenly you're craving the attention of someone else and it's so much more complicated than friendship. No matter how many friends you have or how much your family loves you, you start to feel like something is missing. You see it in the movies. You hear it in the songs. You read it in the books and see it in art. No one can blame you if you start feeling like you need to have it too.
And the loneliness that comes with that need is strong. Their relationship is directly proportional. The more you feel like you have no one to share yourself with, the more you want it. Like an itch at the back of your head that you just have to scratch.
It all starts with loneliness. And so I should have known it when it hit me, that pang of isolation that weighed like a shovel, so great and intense that it was suffocating. I should've known it was the beginning of something of equal magnitude. A furious love, a desperate love, a hungry love that was all-consuming.
Like an inch at the back of your head if your head was all the way across the world.
