Describe a time you felt alone

There is a danger in writing this. It is the same danger there always surfaces in writing. You show too much of yourself and people learn about you in ways you never wanted or you do not show enough about yourself and the writing becomes stilted, stale, dead. The problem is with finding the balance. Well to hell with balance!

I hardly knew her I tell you. I had just met her when this happened. You can't blame me for this!

You can't blame me...

No I can blame you. I can blame whoever I fucking want. Blame does not request acceptance. I can throw my blame at you like a ball of knitting wool. Throw my little black balls on you and they will stick on you whether you reach out for them or not. Here! Catch!

There is no time I remember I was not alone. I am not talking about the feeling of loneliness of not having people around. I am talking about the visceral, gut wrenching loneliness of being alone around other people. Being around people who theoretically are your people. I am talking about the pain of little blind worms eating you from the inside out, hollowing out your body by eating one organ after the other, heart and brain and eyes until the only thing left standing is but a shell.

It's the unbearable knowledge that you are for ever the outsider. The person who looks in from the lighted window, who lurks on the marble steps or under them - if you really want me to get Gothic on you. 

The strange thing is that at first you are alone because this is how life is. Some plants flower amid rocks, others try to grow roots in the asphalt. This is life. Then, later on, you are alone by choice. And here the plant analogy fails. Forget about it, will you?

Practise as they say, makes perfect. Perfect though does not imply proper, does it? It just means you get really good at what you do, whether that is playing a Paganini piece or twirling yourself around and around in your socks on a polished wooden floor or banging your head against a wall till you no longer feel it.

Thus it goes with being alone. After a while you are alone by choice. You remove yourself from human company. It is easier than facing the constant reminder that you do not belong or as Christy Moore says in Ewan McColl's song "You'd better get born in some place else. So move along, get along, Move along, get along, Go! Move! Shift!"

I am cheating here of course. Or maybe I am not. Who gives a fuck?

There is a thing though that might be wrong and a mistake. And that is to assume that the person who is alone is miserable and deserves your pity. "Poor dear. All alone. Lets be humane and offer our condolences and well wishes to this poor, poor dear." I sincerely hope you will not do that. Unless you do wish to drink your meals from now on, or you wish your car to mysteriously, spontaneously combust, while you are in it.

So next time ask me to describe a time when I was not alone, will you?