Loneliness

Is there meaning to my loneliness? Why is it that I seek companionship while alone and yet, while I feel that I'm being loved, I feel suffocated? I constantly seek love and attention, but I seek solitude at the same time.

I have friends... I have family... I'm surrounded by those who love me, but I push them away. But then, when they give me space, I wish for them back. Why?

Am I doomed to this constant fickle mentality? Am I stuck searching for love and then throwing it away? Will I be forever alone because I don't know how to love people in return?

When I look back on the days when love had been so easy for me to give, I feel foolish, silly, stupid. I was so willing to offer love to those around me that I gave it to the wrong people and I paid the consequences. I got hurt... badly.

I learned my lesson then and now, even when I try to give my love stupidly as I had years ago, I can't. My heart is ice, an ice that even I cannot melt. My love is dark, fleeting, bitter and evanescent. It lasts only a very short time and, while it is there, it is wonderful, but when it's gone, I hurt... badly.

I'm always relearning this lesson. Perhaps I'm a slow learner... or else I'm a masochist.

It makes sense. The basket case, the girl who cannot go a single day without hateful, angry, bitter, self-loathsome thoughts unless she takes the right pills at the right time, the girl who has often wanted to die and yet can't manage to grasp the knife.

A suicidal girl with a fear of death... how ironic. Yet, this bitter sarcasm will only bite a moment and then the pain will succeed into knowledge; a painful knowledge that one would rather not know: that life hurts and that there is no escape.

Even death cannot save the damned. And now I retreat back into my hole, fearing the consequences of coming out, even if it was only for a fleeting moment, wishing I hadn't and yet feeling fulfilled.

Because I'm a masochist; a masochist that cannot stand this solitude and yet cannot let it go; a masochist who can only love for short periods of time and then will retreat once again with another lesson... and another... and another...

There is no better teacher than solitude.