January has always been a very lonely month for you.
This, the happiest January you’ve had in a couple years, is also the loneliest.
What did Mark Twain say about lasting a couple of months on a good compliment? Well, a human can last a couple of months on some good companionship — or in your case, a couple of years. Then he or she is on their own.
You would never admit it; being lonely. You’re too rock solid, at least in your own eye. Loneliness is for the weak and the troubled. Loneliness is one of those fowl scents that permeates off of a person like a ghastly mixture or cigarettes and whiskey off of that too-far-gone alcoholic.
You can’t help but feel it, though. Enero, enero, enero. It’s kind of close to zero when you write it out, but that’s a stretch. That lonely month. It’s grinding you down faster than ever. And now, you’re lonely — at times — you’re lonely, that’s the most you’ll ever let yourself admit. It’s a self-admission, and you can’t even give yourself that ground.
You are upset with yourself. You are beside yourself. You can’t forgive yourself because you gave away too much ground. Now you’ve opened your eyes, and now you’re isolated. You know– and you know what is beyond what you know, and that’s really the problem.
You’ve become lonely, and the thing about the lonely is that they stay lonely.
They become fixated on it. Everything they see is the antithesis of themselves. The lonely only see happily waltzing couples in a cascade around them. The lonely families together, being happy and difficult like families do– and you remember how nice it is to be difficult with people at almost no recompense. You see everyone else except the people around you, you hear the people upstairs, at the store, on the TV, at your job, and the cold seeps in just a little deeper.
Everyday that cold sets, you find yourself further away. You are the stranded at sea. The stranded, who don’t believe they ever knew what land looked like.
You’re the lonely, and you don’t know how that changes. You remember the departed, and you see the hand imprinted on your face from each of those who have shunned you. You look at the unknown like an unsolvable puzzle, and a puzzle unsolvable is nothing more than nonsense with a false promise.
You need that puzzle to take shape, though, because the new and unknown is the only thing that really entices you. You see the unknown, those new and unfamiliar to you, and the hunger you once felt in your stomach is located 6 inches above. You hunger for companionship.
You only see the former continually bleeding out, until you realize it’s you who is the trail of blood who has slipped away from the surrounded ones, and you’re a dried out, evaporated puddle of once living loneliness.
You see a woman. You want to talk to her, you want someone like her, one to just share company with, but you feel a paralyziation greater than desire. You don’t talk to her, or the one after her and the one after her, nor the group of them across the room.
You see a group of men joking around, and having a good time. You want something like that to participate in, but you feel more threatened than you feel that desire. You feel like you have to prove yourself, or some sort of superiority, and that’s not comfortable, so you see the group enjoying themselves, they move on, and you see them no more.
Everything you see just further conditions you for your loneliness. Every instance is another opportunity to further prove your loneliness to yourself, scattering you further into isolation.
You know you can fix this loneliness. You know you can find new girls to spend time with, and new guys to hang out. You’ve done it before, and that’s why, even now, you’re not alone, but you don’t trust it because you know doubt better. You know the situation facing dictates that we live in a fast paced, aging world, and you– you only get to know people on a long timeline.
You are no longer afforded to get to know people on a long timeline. You’re writing novels when you should be writing short stories, and everyone else is only reading limericks.
You think and you think. You study. You analyze. You reverse engineer. You practice. You reinvent. You can’t rewire yourself. You can’t understand.
You want to be in the center of it all, amongst strangers and acquaintances. You want to be the one smiling and easily divesting themselves, but you’re not. You aren’t unhappy, but you look it, because that’s what’s comfortable. You don’t give away your smile for free, though it takes less than pennies to earn it, yet you won’t earn anyone else without the charity. You can’t find comfort among the unknown without knowledge, and the unknown won’t seek you out without comfort. It’s a standstill, so you stand still while life moves on.
The lonely don’t figure it out. The lonely are good at being the lonely, because what they do and how they act drives them to loneliness.
What they do and how they act is who they are.
That’s who you are.
And right now, January or not, you’re lonely.
And the lonely will stay lonely.