Same Deep Water As You

“But aren’t you in love with someone? How can you feel lonely when you’re with someone?”

The truth is, I don’t know. It’s like a disease- loneliness. It’s like this malignant infection eating you away on the inside. An infection with no cure, as of yet. You can talk to anyone you want to, go wherever you want to; you are still going to be just as infected as you were yesterday. Or two days ago. Or three days ago.

“I can help you if you tell me what you’re going through.”

That’s another thing about this cruel disease,you can’t tell them or show them how you feel and they can’t see what you’re going through.

Maybe that’s the root cause of loneliness- the absolute inability to communicate everything that holds so much importance inside of your head and the inability to explain why all these things hold that much power inside your head, in the first place. That there is no “why” or “how.” There is absolutely no perfect combination of words to explain this cannibalistic space inside of your head that gnaws away at every good feeling and replaces it all with nothing but numbness; no reason to explain why there are good days and bad days; or why the monster awakens in the presence of a loved one sometimes and stays quiet otherwise. It just is. 

“Just don’t think about it. Don’t give it that much power.”

On some days, yes, you can do that. But on some days, it’s like trying to separate all the dry ingredients from cake batter. That’s how in deep the infection is. There’s no light just at the end of the tunnel, there’s light throughout. It’s just that, how are we to resonate with the light on the outside, and its importance, when that venomous darkness has made a home out of all the wonderful things in our heads? This is how feeling lonely eventually turns into a habit. It turns into something we get used to.

But each morning, we make a choice- to not completely give in to the infection; to fight it. That’s what keeps us going. So everyday, we have to do it all over again: waking up, breathing, smiling, accepting that it’s all going to be okay and that we can all make it through this one day, until it doesn’t hurt as much.

Every day, we try to “not give it that much power” or to “forget about it” or to “talk about it” and we can actually do it, just like every one else. The only difference is that we have to start over again. Everyday.

We’re all in the same deep water, sometimes, there are days where the waves do carry us away but sometimes, just like you, we don’t let the waves carry us away.

And those are the days we live for.

– M. S.