Today's loneliness by TeriLK

Chapter One, Question One: How do I float back up when I am a mass of limbs, tangled in this nothingness? (Floating and Falling)

"Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind. They served as a substitute for experience. Without realizing it, she judged people as much by the standards of Walter Scott and Jane Austen as by any empirically arrived at; seeing those around her as fictional characters, and making poetic judgements on them."(John Fowles, "The French Lieutenant's Woman")

What constitutes a "real" realtionship? Is it the physicality of it? The making out, the sex, the good times, the feeling of his hand around yours fo$r no signifant reason other than it might be cold? or the leaning against him in comfortable silence, or his smell? Is it in the conversations for hours about everything and nothing? The thought of each other in the smallest things - the small things that make up the big things? Is it all of the above?

And, if it is the latter, when something is missing does that make the rest any less "real?"

Some days it's okay... too busy getting hurt by people you love to be in love. Some days I don't miss any of it - especially if I'm reading, or painting, or drawing, or simply observing something beautiful without attachments or complications. Some days who honestly needs "real" and/or "relationships" when you have books and art and the rare chance of glimpsing at the true beauty that's struggles to survive (and still very much exists) in this world?

Then there are other days. Other days, that remind me that despite how dangerous it is to be "in" this abstraction we call love, it is ever more so when that love is lost, and you are alone (though I suppose "lonely" is more fitting in this case). Would we know loneliness without knowing love? Would we know love without knowing loneliness? And how do we go back to one after being so long consumed by the other?

Funny because I found myself floating on love only to fall, more literally, to the depths of lonliness. In that euphoria I seem to have broken every bone in my body, and only now am I left with the pain I should have felt and the reality of not being able to move. How do I float back up when I am a mass of limbs, tangled in this nothingness?

The truth is I write these words and I always stop to laugh at how I can delude myself into feeling better, however temporary. Then again, that relief is then overshadowed by served reminder that I am lonely. There, I said it.

I'm lonely.

And while I can speak of missing this person or that person - even an idea of a person - today's loneliness is the bitterest of them all.

Today's loneliness is for a man I've never had, but have been with completely. A man for whom, in many ways, completes me. A man who I never realized I needed - much less loved - so painfully until I knew I wouldn't under any circumstance ever be with him in the same way again.

And it hurts.

It hurts to be in love and to know love so wholeheartedly and yet not even realize it. It hurts not only the heart, but the mind. The body. It hurts that I don't have anything to remember his face by, and if I did it would not do him justice. It hurts that I have nothing to remind me of how he made me feel because I don't know if I am capable of ever feeling that way again and it hurts.

It hurts because I'm afraid if I think of him and it too much it'll turn out to be a dream.

(A good dream, a nearly perfect dream - nearly because that's not really our style - but a dream nonetheless. It hurts because I can feel him so powerfully in one moment and then in the next instant feel the gaping hole where he should be seconds later.

It hurts.

IT hurts that every human being I encounter henceforth will always be compared to him and found wanting. It hurts because he is so beautiful. His smile, it hurts. His voice, it hurts. His laugh, his jokes, his embrace, his words, his gestures, his kindness, his soul, his being.

I love him, I love everything about him. And it hurts most of all because I'm not ready to put any of it into past tense... nor do I believe I ever will be.