It is amazing how lonely one can feel in a crowded room. I’m sure there are some poetic lyrics that could go with that phrase, maybe an EMO artist, or a lovesick guitarist has some licks, put I’m too put out to search my memory bank. It’s surreal feeling bodies pressed so closely against you, and yet that interminable space, sometimes only made up of the founding particles, feels like the caverns and gulfs of the Grand Canyon.
Even in that shaded twilight, a mix between the dappled morning and the ageing dusk, where a half-smile could be a frown, or a grimace. Those glazed eyes aren’t the effect of meow meow, but a mirage that you can’t quite remove yourself from.
The bond of friendship that was pulled so taught only a day ago, is suddenly slack in your hands, as you slip on the absailing rock of relationships. You try to feel that beat, dance that boogie, but there’s no one rocking with you, and instead you sidle your way over to the loser corner, collapse in a leather arm-chair and stare out at the traffic below. Antisocialism is marked across your forehead, and yet those morphing shadows of the dance hall hide you pretty well. I guess maybe you’ve become a speck in the far distance of the valley, still unseen, even as people make out right beside you.
I wonder at times, whether intimacy really exists. Well of course it does. We are made to be intimate. But I have a problem with its continuity. I can catch a stranger’s eye, an animal’s eye even, and there is that brief period of intimacy where you can almost feel the formation of their thoughts. Yet looking into the eyes of a friend, someone you’ve known for years, there is that abyss of distance that simply glares back at you.
To feel lonely in a crowded room isolated in a bustling street. And yet I feel choked and stifled in an empty lift, claustrophobic in the isolated island of my mind.
Maybe I just have issues.
Maybe I’m the only person that really exists.
Desert Places
by Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
I love you very much
[...] I did a Post on Feeling Lonely in a Crowded Room. Although to some degree those feelings have intensified, as has the feeling of having a close [...]