Being alone

You're never alone, even when you think you are. Just listen, then think, and realize.

No one likes the idea of being alone. The idea of having no one around you, no one there for you, nothing to touch and see. It drives us crazy. We get so panicky about it we go to the people closes to us and hug them for no reason. We express our undying appreciation for them out of the blue. And they look at us like we’re weirdoes. But they don’t know. They haven’t visualized it. They haven’t allowed the possibility of solitude to slip into their mind. They haven’t daydreamed about it. Well, I wouldn’t call it day dreaming, because dreams are pleasant. This, loneliness, isn’t. Because the silence at the start of it is only the beginning. It’s literally deafening, and from there you begin a downwards spiral of lonesome peril.

It's not the silence that gets to you. It's the white noise. That unnerving resonance that echoes in your ears, despite the fact that everything is utterly still and mute, sinking deep into your cognizance. It's the ringing static that drives you insane. You can hear your heart beating, feel it pounding harder and harder within your chest as you listen to your own vitality panic. Anxiety from your heart trails back up to your head. Where there's panic in the heart there's panic in the mind. All at once your conscious is flooded by a mass array of thoughts and emotions. Conversations, regrets and consequences as old as time resurface and you actually go insane. There's nothing to comfort you. No words of endearment, like a mother’s coo to her baby. There's no one to distract you, or tell you everything's alright. And because with white noise comes isolation, there's no physical comfort either. There's no one to hold you, cradle you, stroke your hair and skin, kiss your forehead and cheeks, or hold your hand.

So you stand there, or sit, if you've found the fetal position already, utterly alone. There's nothing to touch, except the frigid floor beneath you and the cold walls around you, which seem to stretch on forever. You can't reach out to anyone, and no one reaches out to you. Sure, you could feel your own body warmth, but it eventually chills. It’s as if the isolation is slowly killing you, causing your body to grow cold.

The sound of your hastened breathes and throbbing heartbeat is the only thing you can hear. The frosty tension of the atmosphere is all you can feel. The only thing you can smell is your own perspiration. And the only thing you can taste is the bitter dryness of your mouth. All you can do is rock back and forth in attempt to comfort yourself, while your arms constrict your body. You can’t even talk to yourself after a while of doing so, because your own insanity frightens you. You close your eyes in hopes of shutting out the blank void that engulfs you. With your eyes closed you try to go to your happy place, of warmth, talking, laughing and joy. But it doesn’t help, not enough to drown out the deafening silence that suffocates you on the outside. You might get a moment of peace, but that’s all.

This is what it means to be alone. When you have nothing, not even the warmth of your own body, you are truly alone. Without the company of at least one other living being you’re deserted. And when you can’t stand yourself, you’re forlorn. Imagine that, not being able to handle yourself due to insanity. You could argue with yourself but that’d only make it worse, because your words will reach only your ears and touch your mind. All you’d do is cycle the insanity over and over until you mute yourself in order to preserve what sanity you may still have.

If you’re anywhere else, surrounded by anything more than this, you’re not alone. An empty forest doesn’t exist, neither does an empty desert and tundra. The forest holds more wildlife than just about anywhere. Its vegetation, inhabiting animals and warm earth is all the comfort one would need. Everything’s breathing and alive, vibrant and beautiful. You could befriend the animals, learn what they know, adapt and be happy. Without other humans your sanity will diminish, but at least you’re happier. The tundra and desert are similar; in the tundra you still have animals, vegetation and earth. It may be a little colder, so comfort would be a little more difficult to obtain, but you could still be content enough to keep part of your sanity. The desert is possibly the best comparison when placed beside complete isolation, because of its dry heat, vast emptiness and lethal animals/insects. You’d probably be the least happy here, compared to the other places, but you can honestly say you weren’t alone.

Most don’t live in places like those, however. A majority, virtually everyone actually, who claim to be alone live in cities and towns. Their lives consist of electricity, family, neighbors, and random folk like the supermarket’s employees or that guy that picks up your trash with careless hands. Not a single one of them are alone. Blind, perhaps, and oblivious. But not alone. Each one of those self-proclaimed lonesome people is enveloped with life. They, you, may not see it or know it, but on the scale of alone and overwhelmed, they’re in the middle. Since they’re in the middle, they’re balanced. Why wouldn’t someone want to be balanced? Suppose it doesn’t matter, because they never see it as a good thing. They’re entirely blind to the fact that being popular isn’t everything. Sometimes being popular isn’t on their mind. Most just want to be accepted, or they don’t realize they’re pushing people away. There’s multiple reasons why someone might think they’re alone.

Take for instance, Elizabeth. She’s your typical teenager at the age of 16. She attends high school, has a younger brother, a mother and father, and stays after school on Tuesdays for a book club. In school she’s at the top of her class. She’s smarter than half the seniors. She takes only AP classes and nothing less, studies for hours after school, reads whenever she isn’t studying, and when she’s doing neither she’s eating ramen or sleeping. A few people from school have tried to ask her out on outings but she declines with a stoic shoulder. Her younger brother is shut from her life every time he tries to get her to play. At first she’d close the door on him, now she just locks it. Her mother and father have tried to get her to attend family functions. Family time could be as complex as a reunion. Or it could be as simple as dinner together or a movie night. No matter what it may be she stays silent behind the dejection of her door, within the confines of her room. Each day that passes makes her feel more and more lonely, so she relies on her books and studies, thinking they’re enough to keep her company.

One day she wonders from her studies, because she hears children laughing and playing outside her window. For once in a long time she wonders why she never does that, have fun. She looks at her phone, which hasn’t received any calls or texts in months, then to her door, which is locked, like always. Tiny streams of liquid salt make their way down her cheek then, because she realizes what she’d done. She was alone because she did it, it was her fault. She pushed everyone away, shut them all out. Sure, she was successful in school and smart, but she could’ve paced herself and still be just as great.

She had two choices now. She could wallow in her loneliness or she could change it. Elizabeth ops in changing it by shoving away her books and unlocking the door, so she can suggest a spontaneous movie night with her family. After that she texts a few numbers in her phone. Elizabeth can’t really call them friends, because she’d pushed them so far back they probably didn’t know her number anymore. Thereafter, when her rekindled friends reply, agreeing to meet up, Elizabeth feels a surge of warmth overcome her. That same feeling you get when you make plans with your best friend or lover floods her, and tingles her sense more than any book could. She’d never been alone. And once she realized why she was by herself, she fixed it. So she could be happy.

In another instance there’s Ashley. She’s the same age as Elizabeth, she goes to high school, and has an older sister, mother and father. But her grades are low, about a D average. She never studies, or attends class for that matter. Whenever she does attend class the other kids stare, point, snicker and giggle under their breath at her. She sees it and feeds into it. She sees how they glance from her jet black hair, raccoon eyes, pale blush, blackened lips, ripped shirts and jeans, thick fishnet and clunky buckled boots. They sport expressions that vary from amusement, to disgust. The females roll their eyes and tsk their tongue. The males snicker and mock. It becomes too much for her, so she picks up the one book she brought and dashes out the classroom’s door. In the next moment she’s in the woman’s bathroom, where she texts the one friend she does have. That friend joins her in the bathroom, so they can make fun of the preps and jocks together. It brightens her up, but only for the time being. She and her friend leave school grounds then, hang out at decrypted shops, and eventually part ways for home.

When she arrives at home her mother and father are screaming at each other, just like the always do. Her father firmly holds the neck of a beer, it’d been his 8th of the night. Her mother wields a neon thong, which obviously doesn’t belong to her. So like always she sneaks in from the back and makes a beeline for her room, where her parents can’t see her but she can hear them. She can hear them screeching, her mother screaming about how her father drinks and cheats. Her father yells about how her mother is being a hypocrite because she’s an undercover prostitute and does cocaine. She tries to drown them out. But no amount of music could flush away the screams, which rattle the shabby walls and shiver throughout the derelict floors. So she cries, because she’s all alone. There’s no one there, not even her sister, who stays out late partying. After crying for a good hour she looks to her phone. A sniffle or two is made when she realizes she wasn’t alone, she had her friend. Getting up now, she texts her friend and slips out her broken window to meet up with her. Thereafter, meeting her friend leads her to a correctional institute, for addicts. A counselor waits for them there, where Ashley pours her heart out about her family and the condition she lives in. From there she gets help, and so does her family, further proving she wasn’t alone.

Now, let’s see. There’s Jeremy. He’s a bit younger than the girls, at the age of 13. He’s just at the mark of being a teenager, but he has no family, no actual school. He’s an orphan. He’d been one for almost all his life thus far, since his mother abandoned him in ramshackle park. A random passerby spotted him, a toddler barely able to climb the monkey bars he so desperately tried to scale. He was taken to the local children’s home and that’s where he stayed, even now. Since that day he felt alone. Not just alone, but cold, in a depressed state. The thought of his mother abandoning him haunted him ceaselessly. The more he thought about it the worse he felt. It was the only memory he had from his early childhood. All he could remember was screaming, crying out for his mommy as she walked away without a second glance, whiskey in hand. He tried to run after her, but a car pulled beside his mother, she climbed into it and zoomed off. That was the last he saw of her.

His loneliness was paired with abandonment, which increased his isolation from others tenfold. He never spoke to the other children, never played. He barely talked to the nuns. Coloring didn’t interest him, hopscotch, hide-n-seek, board games; he overlooked them all with zilch curiosity. He primarily stayed in his own little corner, hugging a buzz lightyear doll, staring at the floor while sitting with his legs curled up. Children tried to socialize with him. One in particular constantly tried to get him to smile. That’s all she wanted, was to see him smile. If she could make him smile once she’d be happy. But he denied her every time. Each time he did so she’d try again later, and when she did he gradually stopped shutting her out. At first he was silent, and then he’d snap. After some time he stopped snapping and delayed talking with silence. Eventually he got to the point where he could share his spot with her, but he hadn’t smiled yet. So as the days went by the girl tried harder and harder, until one day he smiled, because she’d given him a turtle shaped cookie. He loved turtles.

See, all had different stories. They went through different scenarios with different people, but they suffered similarly. Loneliness had been on their minds. Stress ruled their lives, emotions governed their actions, or lack thereof. It took some time before they either found company, were granted it or realized they had it all along. Once they did realize it, they were so much happier. Point is, they’d never been alone. People were always there. Elizabeth had her friends and family. Ashley had her friend and the counselor. And Jeremy had the little girl and other children.

Even those in the darkest depths of themselves have someone. It may be just one person or it could be a few, maybe even a huge group of them. What you’d have to keep in mind is that it’s better to have a couple close friends than a room full of fake friends. And remember that you’re never truly alone. You’re not utterly alone unless you’re in a void by yourself, with nothing but yourself. So when you think you’re alone look at the bigger picture. Look to your phone, to your computer. Look outside, or in the living room. Listen to the sweet sound of laughter, the comfort of chit chat. Feel the warmth of reassurance from those you can depend on.

So go ahead, give your friends and family a hug, tell them you love them. Tell them you need them. Let them know how much they mean to you. Hang out with them, laugh and play. Goof off on your downtime. Make downtime for them. Don’t ever ignore them or push them away. And don’t you ever say you’re alone. Open your perception up and look at everything around you with unbiased eyes and an open mind. Realization is one of the most beautiful things in life. Life can be rough and tough, so take what beauty you can from it and make yourself shine.