a beautiful kind of loneliness.

she has found peace in the endless hours of alone.

There is a beautiful kind of loneliness.  One that conjures up images of a candlelit apartment with a view over the River Seine.  This girl, sadness wrapped around her like the cashmere blanket over the back of the sofa, she glows in the halo of the hallowed lonely.  There is something that screams ingénue.  Screams it at the top of her lungs.  Because she drinks tea on window seats and presses her forehead against the rain-soaked panels of the glass.  She listens to her music solely on vinyl and bemoans that no one has the same taste as her.  She drowns herself in the large glasses of wine she drinks in the bubble topped bath.  Staring endlessly through the open window, the lights of the Eiffel Tower reflected in her eyes.  

Eyes that glimmer with unshed tears.  That crinkle delicately at the edges as she views the world in quiet contemplation. 

This girl, she dances on the weekends and writes on a typewriter in the dead of night.  She floats in and out of people’s lives.  Mysterious and magnetic and magical.  She practises witchcraft on Wednesdays and wishes to the blue moon for a future more hopeful than her own.  She reads books with beautiful covers, annotates the lines in pencil and folds down the corners in a dog-eared attempt at remembering all the words she’s read. 

Loneliness drifts around her like a gentle perfume.  Because she has filled her life with more than friendships, more than intimate connections.  She has her books and her art and her passions and her hobbies.  She has found peace in the endless hours of alone. She smiles. Because lonely dresses her in silks and drips her with jewels. Gives her glamour and timelessness and enough beauty to be an envy the world over.

Only, that kind of beautiful loneliness doesn’t exist out here in the world of reality and realism and logic.

Loneliness doesn’t linger and touch with gentle grace.  It doesn’t bring you the beauty of unshed tears and wistful hours spent bending the world to your will.  It doesn’t find you in the city of love.  In a place of romance and long revelled in dreams. 

Loneliness finds you on the cold bathroom floor at two o’clock in the morning.  The lines of grout carving marks into the bare skin of your legs.  Hair greasy and unkempt.  Makeup half washed off. A soup stain on the dirty fabric of your week-old pyjamas.  The world spins as you look up at the ceiling because you couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed even to eat or drink so now you’re lightheaded and nauseous at the same time.

It finds you at six thirty in the morning when the alarm goes off for your day of work.  Clutches at your ribcage while you wonder how much life has passed you by.  It hits you out of nowhere on your commute.  A car dealership reminding you of a car in another life.  Tears spring up out of nowhere and you’re forced to wipe them away before you take a deep breath and face the day.  It’s an odd sense of longing for something you haven’t had longer than you did. 

Your life is an endless cycle of what you want and what you have.  It ebbs and flows between contentment and desperate loneliness.  It hits you – the lonely – like a sharp slap across a cool cheek.  In the middle of the day, in crowded rooms, in revelling bars.  Hits you in the car and on the train and in the freezer aisle of the supermarket.  It sneaks up on you like the ghost of yesterday.  You forget sometimes, let yourself be lulled into false security and false promise.  Think that you’re past it all and that you’ve left it all behind.  But loneliness never lets go of you.  Never lets you leave it in the dead and done and buried.

Loneliness sounds like the phone not ringing. Reminding you that everyone else moved on but you married your demons and chained yourself to your childhood bed. It sounds like the echoing whispers bouncing around four familiar walls. Will I die in the same bed I was born into?

It strikes hard and cold and eternal. Catches you off guard even as you stare into the eyes of another human. Sneers unflinchingly from across the room as you laugh with so called friends. Twists itself around your spine to whisper in your ear that it’s all just an illusion after all. It doesn’t listen to the ticking clock of time as it tries to mend all wounds. It just comes back. Again and again and again.

You can try and romanticise the grip that loneliness has on you.  Dress it up like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Paint it in the best of all the colours.  Write it in the best of all the words.  Give it beauty and nuance and meaning.  In the end it all means nothing at all.   

Lonely doesn’t seek to be seen through the rose-tinted glass of film reel.  It doesn’t seek to be heard through the filtered speakers of overused headphones.  In fact, if it had it’s way loneliness would never see the light of day.

Because what this beautiful kind of loneliness doesn’t paint in the right light is all the words that are never said.  The shame.  The blame game.  The endless wondering if maybe this time you’re too late.  The endless ripples because it doesn’t just disappear.  It destroys not only the friendships you lost but all the ones you try to have in the future.  It’s the truth that you can never speak.  The deep-down fear that maybe something is wrong with you.  Maybe the demons are right.  It poisons everything you had and everything you may have again.  Because they’ll never understand.

There’s a beautiful kind of loneliness.  It’s the one that exists in your mind.  That place you escape to because the harsh light of truth is something you just can’t face.