Those Who Walk Alone At Night

Chapter Six- The Lonely. (Solitude Within Multitude.)

Shawm was that type of lonely that physically hurts. That makes your chest tight and your shoulders heavy. The kind that makes you feel like the ghost of your old imaginary friend. She clung to music, poems, quotes, to writing, to art, to the shadows of the room and emptiness of the night, to herself, to anything but the truth.

She was as elegance in her loneliness as she was in everything else, if a little bitter in her haunting of her own life, but it was an elegance born from disarray and lies. It was breaking her shoulders under the weight of it again and again until the bones healed strong enough to lift it. It was sitting between four walls, listening to the same song on repeat, and filling up the hole with stones and skittles until it was full and she couldn't feel it anymore.

But some of the rocks were too big to fit in her chest and the skittles didn't fill every crack, so the absence of the sun shone through until she emptied herself out again, trying, again and again, to find the right order so that it all fit perfectly.

She did not walk along abandoned city streets, secretly in search of a home like someone else she knew, but amongst the people. The crowded downtown district, Chinatown's and avenues, feeling the brush of people who didn't realize she was there until too late. She did not bother to prove to the living that she was there, living in that place in the corner of their eye. They would see her if they would just look. Some did; most didn't.

There was something serene about it, the ability to feel the weeds growing silently under the city's concrete, waiting for the day humanity no longer existed to trample over it, the cosmos above silently swaying, soothing and healing.

She felt a little like one of those constellations, visible only as another grouping of stars amongst the others and painted as part of the night sky, but in reality trapped in the vast vortex of space, cold and dark and greedy in its expansion around her.

It was remarkable; how she could stand in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by noise and people, signs of life, and only think of the distance between stars. If she looked down, angled her head and then her eyes at the ground just right, she was certain she would be able to see the cavernous distance between her and everyone else in the world.

She was not a child anymore. She wore her loneliness like clothes. It's tears and cracks in her lips, the raw tips of her fingers. The shaking of her fatigued limbs. It's "And all that I loved, I loved alone." tattooed on her skin wherever she imagined it.

It was far too poetic to speak to the reality of it, the division between them caused not by their lack of noticing but her lack of mortality. That little spark, whatever it may be, that made them all human was not found inside her.

In its place was a hole she, as a child, had tried to fill with stones and skittles, but in that she now found a sense of identity, a way for the moonlight to shine through her.

She would always refuse to confront the fact that she may be alone because she has made the wrong decisions and insisted that her eyes burned brighter with solitude.