Loneliness

After a heavy meal, you feel drowsy and lethargic and plain lazy. So you retire to bed early, hoping for a rest. As you lie on the side, deep inside you mixed feelings of loneliness and horniness and nostalgia and dual opposing forces of being drawn to and repelled by members of the opposite sex hit you with a hurricane force. Somewhere haunting words of a woman who experienced and practiced onanism, teenage sex, and intense, excruciating loneliness echoed in your mind:

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. Learn to accept it and love it. Once you manage to do that, you will know true independence and will not care for casual sex and an easy romp in the hay. You let loneliness tunnel deep into you until it hits your soul. And then a strange thing happens, you feel your soul expand and grow and understand not only yourself but others as well. Don't expect to outgrow loneliness. Don't think it will go away. It may lie dormant while you are having an intense sex session, but it surely will come back and knock on the door of your soul once the sex is over and you look closely at the face of your sex partner, at his sex organ and back to his face and you wonder if you love him enough to die for him or conversely he for you. You have doubts, so you ask him. And he says, after two seconds of hesitation, of course, I do, baby, but why you ask. You know then he has lied. You are glad he does not ask you the same question. But you remember once when you were young and green and first gingerly yet eagerly at the same time explored the sensations of love and sex or whatever the hell people call it, with the local boy four houses down the street, he swore up and down that he loved you and would die for you and you believed him until you discovered he slept with your best friend, too. So, now you give up hope to find people who will understand you, cherish you, and love you as much as, if not more than, they love themselves; people who will be sweet and tender and patient to you; people who will forgive you and stay with you and be there for you. You give up to find somebody to fill the huge space now occupied by the queen called loneliness. The best that you ever hope for is for you to understand yourself and accept who you are and find out what you want out of life and go for it. All the memories and nostalgia and longings and wishful thinking that come to you late at night or at odd moments when you listen to the oldies on the radio only serve as a reminder that life is a long process of coping with disappointment and yet we all long for love, for the impossible.