I thought i had grown out of this
Subways and shopping centres, these are places of loneliness. It grips my tongue and imposes its terrible silence when I turn to the one next to me and want to speak. It’s almost as if I do not exist and the thought makes me tremble in some minor way because of its persistence, its day to day occurrence which pesters my movements. I gaze at wonderful women, at lowly women, only to see if they return my doleful enquiries. If only they would. Then I would exist, I would have a place, I would become a thought in someone else’s head, a companion to my own thoughts and fanciful musings. Does she shudder to look at me? Does she seek out those feathery brushings of skin or fabric that make you aware of seconds, of slow chugging rhythms?
Often I wish to follow these silent sirens and today I had it in mind to record the experience of intimate distance but I had the misfortune of reading Virginia Woolf and she had recorded it for me, more masculine than I could ever be, more real in the simulations of language than my painful moments of experience.
In thought I am not alone and somehow it turns into a longing for isolation. If only I had not read. If only the wishes and thoughts belonged only to me and not ink bound genius. If only the connection had been real and immediate, trapped within the confines of a minute, of a train trip, rather than the span of years and history that makes my daily suffering old and stale. Words that have already been uttered and destroyed placed on paper and turned into universal cleverness. Who am I if I can’t help but find myself on paper, characters that are less than real but precede you and make you feel meek and redundant?
If all things remained the same perhaps happiness would come to me. If only there was one day rather than a repetition of them. How easily paranoia comes to me, how difficult it is to build this fragile ego that seems to rest on faulty foundations, needs that cannot be gratified and delusions that cannot hope for the comfort of reality.
It is a difficult thing to describe – being an individual. Where would you start, or more importantly, where would it end? I wonder if it will always be this intensely lonely experience, this feeling of being imprisoned within the narrow confines of my senses. I feel left out, as if the limits of my experience disallow genuine connection with other souls, the way birds miss each other in flight, not out of some conscious rational, but out of sheer necessity.
No matter how many times you encounter yourself in others or the products of others, there is always some indescribable distance between who you are and that recognition.
Maybe we find true connection to be obliterating.
Whenever we fall in love with find parts of that other person left within us like sea debris that wash up in our lives, reminding us of a foreign presence. We might find ourselves buying a c.d. or film just because it was a favourite of our loved one. Or we might use one of their figures of speech. We might find ourselves becoming a bit less of us and a bit more of them. Is that what we find terrifying about love – the constant companionship without any corresponding diminishment in isolation?
I do not want so much to take someone into my bed as take them into my head so they can alleviate the terrible echo of my own voice. My mind is a ready built city that waits for nothing more than a population to give it life.
I hate being its lone voice, its lone occupant.
What an awful waste.