the land of what will never be
Don’t wish. Don’t start.
Wishing only wounds the heart.
Archive for tag Loneliness
not in this timeline
a phantom lifestyle imagined by my
fevered mind where there would be someone at
home who would wish me luck and send me out
with a hug and a kiss, and there would be
someone to look forward to seeing once
it’s all over
some other lifetime, or some other branch
universe, splitting off from some moment
before I erred and made the wrong choices
before the stars went astray and awry
before the decisions were taken from
my hands
to believe that this was how it was all
meant to turn out—the thought makes my heart ache
my breaths painful to draw—that this was some
unavoidable, inescapable
doom
that God would be so cruel to condemn not
just me, but any soul to so hopeless
so desolate a fate, leaves me tired
aching and weary, my faith tattered and
torn
perhaps my only consolation is
that somewhere in this multiverse there is
a version of me who knows what it is
to be happy
the the past comes bubbling up to the present
Apparently one of my neighbors is either reminiscing about the past, or feeling heartbroken, or both, because he/she was playing this song from TLC from yesteryear:
I never asked for this feeling.
I never thought I would fall.
I never knew how I felt
‘til the day you were gone.
I was lost.
I never asked for red roses.
I wasn’t looking for love.
Somehow I let my emotions take hold
and guess what, all at once
I’m in love.
Oh, I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Why did I act like you mattered?
It was silly of me to believe
that if I just opened my heart
things would come naturally.
Joke’s on me.
I did not ask for love letters,
so why did you give them to me?
How could I let your intentions
get hold over me?
So in love,
so naive.
Oh, baby.
Oh, I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
And, oh, how I hate what you have done.
Made me fall so deep in love.
Got no cure.
You’re the only one I want.
That I love.
Oh, baby.
Oh I miss you so much.
I long for your love.
It scares me
‘cause my heart gets so weak
that I can’t even breathe.
How can you take things so easily?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
Baby, why aren’t you missing me?
—”I Miss You So Much” by TLC, on Fan Mail, 1999
What a way to wake up in the morning.
abandon in place
It’s about 3am and I’m utterly exhausted. I’ve pushed myself to the brink for no good reason and I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m not entirely certain what I’m trying to prove here.
I try a reconfiguration to see if it will make a difference, and I guess I’ve proven to myself what she knew all along once upon a time, that my attempts at fixing things end up being mere rearrangements. I don’t so much clean as reshuffle. Things move around, but nothing really changes.
The sea metaphor always comes easily, particularly in the deep dark night when I’m feeling lonely and abandoned. And I kind of wonder if this is what it’s like to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, with no hope of rescue. You’re bobbing up and down on the waves like another piece of flotsam, just drifting.
I imagine that even if you’re in the deep South Pacific, you’d start swimming. The chance of actually hitting land is virtually nil, but what else are you gonna do?
Still, the thought of trying not to drown for days upon days—alone and with no one looking for you—just steals my breath like a punch in the gut. Trying to imagine that much continuous bleakness and emptiness is quite literally more than I can bear. The idea of never reaching shore is absolutely appalling.
But that’s what I’m faced with: to keep swimming, although with every day, the chance of rescue comes ever closer to zero. The idea that I’ll ever touch dry land again before I die is becoming increasingly absurdly implausible, to the point of becoming utterly fantastic.
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
loneliness
Loneliness is both painful to experience and potentially deadly. “It’s actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you,” he said.
to wish impossible things
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
….
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
purpose
Oh, I’ve wasted my life.
—Jeff Albertson AKA The Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons”
The past two weeks have been something of a rollercoaster. Sadly, I didn’t really go anywhere other than back-and-forth between L.A. and S.D. Although I’m not really sure where I would go. (One of these days I’ll make it up to Alaska, but I figure I need a few weeks or so, but that is neither here nor there.)
I had meant to write something a couple of hours ago. I’m not exactly sure what set my wheels spinning, but maybe if I keep rambling on, it’ll come out eventually.
Mostly because I’ve had way too much free time, I’ve found myself ruminating too much about the fact that I’ve been alone for a really long time. This is something a few of my friends harangue me about, advising me that it’s unhealthy, and while probably true, my will has snapped or something. It was kind of funny recalling my various misadventures since graduating from college with B, and for some reason, talking to him made me more hopeful. Despite the fact that I’ve declared that I’ve given up all hope, and that I’m changing my focus to being content with the current state of affairs.
It was probably because B brought up my lost chances with J (What was that, five, six years ago?) How pathetic is that? I’m enumerating my most hopeful failures.
But I seem to have swung back down to reality. Sure, I have a whole future to plan out. Hell, I still have to tie up the loose strings of this year.
In a somewhat irritating bout of synchronicity, my mom has gone full bore about wanting grandchildren, which, despite A’s once-upon-a-time true assertion that you don’t really need to be in a relationship to have a kid, is somewhat difficult without someone to have them with.
I’ve got nothing.
But whatcha gonna do? It’s been a long time. Why should anything change?
this type of hero
How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)
Somewhat sadly and quite pathetically, I’ve come to identify myself with an unusual type of literary protagonist: the hero who doesn’t get the girl. Off the top of my head, there are only really three stories I can think of where this happens unambiguously.
Though I actually have never read it, the first one is Wuthering Heights, in the character of Heathcliff. My friend was reading Wuthering Heights at the time and told me that I reminded her of this character. (Great.) But I actually probably first ran into this character in Michael Penn’s song ”No Myth” which is, naturally, a song about a guy who isn’t able to hook up with the girl that he loves. But I think it definitely ranks up there on the list of obscure literary references made by a pop song. (Interesting bits of trivia: Michael Penn is the brother of the actor Sean Penn, and married the singer Aimee Mann) While this song came out in 1990, the most striking memory I have attached to this song is driving up 880 in Milpitas in 1998, although I don’t particularly remember where I was going.
Another character to which I’ve been likened is Sydney Carton, the doomed alcoholic barrister who falls hopelessly in love with Lucy Manette, and for whom he eventually sacrifices his life for. I didn’t read this book until my junior year in college, during a trans-Pacific plane trip to the Philippines. My sister had just read it for high school at the time. What struck her about the character was the aura of wasted potential that clung to this character.
Lastly, and perhaps less literary, is Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series. The love of his life, Lily Evans, ends up marrying a guy Severus totally hates, James Potter. Lily is eventually murdered by the Dark Lord Voldemort, providing the driving force for Snape’s hidden-yet-unwavering opposition to the bad guys, although he is eventually killed as well (for what I feel were rather arbitrary reasons, but I guess an author has got to do what an author has got to do when a deadline is looming.) He kind of combines the increasing bitterness and vengefulness of Heathcliff driven by losing the woman he loves first to marriage to a rival, and then to death, with Sydney Carton’s aura of wasted potential, total despair and wanton self-sacrifice, dying what seems to me, a meaningless death, since he does not get to find out that Voldemort was successfully vanquished and that Harry actually lives.
When I first read the dénouement to Snape’s subplot, I was astonished. Here was an actual character who could hold the torch for a lost love some 15+ years after the fact, and who ends up dedicating his entire life in memory of her, without hope or ambition of ever finding love again. As far as he was concerned, it seemed to me that he considered his life pretty much over. Finally. A character that I could relate to!
The astonishment soon turned into a mild depression, with the realization that the probability of me dying alone and unloved is pretty high, and ever increasing with time, and while it doesn’t seem like a good way to go, I’m in no mood to really do anything about it. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking hopeless.
But then again, there are far worse things in life than to be alone and unloved. For some unknown reason, the depression managed to snap a few days ago. While nothing has changed with regard to my non-existent love life, there seems to be something that has changed in my perspective.
My current attitude seems to range somewhere between “oh well” and “I don’t give a fuck.” I haven’t exstinguished hope entirely, but I’m pretty much gearing myself up for a continued solitary existence for however many more years I may have left. (I am utterly convinced that I am going to die young, for pointless reasons, and in quite possibly a violent manner.) Odds say, given my personal and strong family history of depression, anxiety, and just general insanity, I am most likely to end my life in suicide. Still, you can never rule out the random drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway. Or early-onset coronary artery disease, the way my diet is. Suicide by hamburger. What a way to go.
Then I read about this metaphor about life, and I have to say, “Yeah. That’s it.”
Life. You do with it what you can. The faster your realize the things you can’t or won’t do, the less time you waste living with regret. I guess. Something like that.
feeling abandoned
I have spent the last 80 hours or so without speaking to another soul. (I am not counting buying stuff at the store, or communicating via computer.) I can’t help but wonder if anyone would miss me if I disappeared.
It’s easy to wallow in self-pity, but it’s not pity that I want or need. I just need human interaction. It’s really starting to get to me. I’m wondering how long I can go like this before I really start going crazy—I mean, certifiably loonie, with an indication for admission to the inpatient psych ward.
You know you’re pathetic and lonely when you start wishing that you could hear voices in your head, even if all they’re doing is berating you for how pathetic you are.
The bigger problem, though, is that I don’t want to do a goddamn thing about it. Although I don’t really know if “want” is the right word for it. I mean, sure, part of it is being paralyzed by fear. I’ve spent so much time by myself that I don’t even know what it’s like to have friends anymore. Interacting with people is becoming strange to me, and a little frightening.
I don’t understand where I went wrong. I don’t know why I can’t seem to muster the energy to reach out. Because clearly no one is going to come looking for me.
I realize that I could’ve been dead for three days, and because it was the weekend, no one would know I was gone.
What I wouldn’t do for a chance to start over again. I would be willing to go back all the way to college, even, just to see if I could somehow make things go right for me. Despite the fact that I’ve actually accomplished one thing in my life, I would give it away in a second for a chance to be a normal human being.
I’m really getting sick of this half-life existence. I feel like I’m up against a wall. I don’t really know what to do next. Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to accomplish? I feel like I’m just hanging out here gathering dust, and I just don’t want to do anything to help myself.
There is something seriously wrong with me.
the problem of living in a vacuum
I’ve been living by myself for two years now, and I think it’s starting to wear on my soul. In the past, I’ve at least had roommates (despite the fact that I have wanted some of them arrested and/or shot by the cops) and this ensured a minimal amount of human contact.
The solitude has allowed me to drop my expectations pretty low. In some basic ways, I’ve let myself hit bottom, and no one really gives a shit. I’ve wallowed in my crapulence for months now, and it doesn’t change a thing.
The thing I miss a lot about having regular human contact is being able to bounce ideas off of someone. These days, ideas materialize in my mind, and they either end up on the ether (like this), or sometimes just written down, or, more often than not, they just evaporate. And given the state of things, I have no real feedback about my ideas. No one gives a fuck, really. Is this ludicrous? Does this resonate with the truth? Can I refine this idea and come up with something useful?
What I need is someone to critique my life, either positively or negatively. While I’m not a big fan of negative reinforcement (and find that my performance actually degenerates/deteriorates in the face of getting yelled at and beat down), I appreciate it when people can be honest with me, when they can actually tell me when I’m being a dickhead, and, more importantly, tell me what I can do to stop.
Instead, all I’ve got is my conscience, which I find is sometimes wary about self-judgement, because of past experiences of being too hypercritical, and thereby plunging me into an inexorable spiral of depression. So I find my conscience lets a lot of things slide (mostly for the better) but there are probably a lot of things that I’ve stopped caring about that the average human being would find mildly to moderately important.
Originally posted on Starlight and Gravity