In the lonely hours
they cry for their humanity.
For the lost past,
for the uncertain present
they wander lost.
Together,
alone.
In the lonely hours
they cry for their humanity.
For the lost past,
for the uncertain present
they wander lost.
Together,
alone.
What is this softness
that takes my heart dancing
beneath the sad moon?
When aching life pours from the sky,
and my heart cries
to be heard
for once
without question.
Will I listen?
No.
I will hear,
but I will not listen, for fear,
of what?
The heart needs too much.
The heart needs too much
that I,
whoever I am,
cannot ask life to give.
There is depth and beauty in loneliness.
It is quiet.
Peaceful.
And though I’ve never known it,
loneliness is the wave that has known me
a lifetime, long.
Its quiet waits for nothing,
it just hangs in the air,
aching,
holding me closer
and closer
until I am quiet, too.
I will try to let it be.
To never ask it to leave,
but instead,
let it fill me
until I have no room left inside.
I will let it be, now,
loneliness.
I will no longer be attached
to wishing it gone.
Sometimes I feel lonely.
Sometimes, in those moments of quiet, I wish that someone brave and beautiful would find me, and speak to me, and hold me tighter than that.
Someone brave enough to see all of me, and feed themselves into my world on a platter of authentic beauty.
But this is the kind of beauty a soul finds only in the deep end of life, and so sometimes I feel lonely.
Even when others are around.
Because the world is not yet brave enough to be everything it was made to be, not even on days when I am lonely.
And wishing to the sky for more.
I’ve had thousands of best friends and hundreds of mortal enemies.
I’ve been married a hundred times and divorced a hundred times more than that, probably. I’ve had lovers aplenty, built homes, mucked stables…and all this time, I’ve insisted I am an alone person. Oh no. I have never been alone, not for a day of my whole life long.
Books are sneaky like that, aren’t they? They introduce us to friends as real as the ones that stand before us, and they break our hearts just as deeply as a lost real-life love might. Books are a powerful force, and they are as real as reality itself: because, actually, what is reality? Our mind’s perception of a scene laid out before us.
That description of reality sounds an awful lot like our experience of a book, don’t you think? The difference being: a book gives us longer to sit within the scene and hold it up against our real life for review. True reality, in contrast, usually comes and goes in a flash.
I invite you to open your mind and your heart to the idea of a book and its characters being as real as any other aspect of reality. Think of how beautifully full life would be if we all embraced that idea. No one would ever be lonely— our books would see to it that we’d have a friend for every day of the week, or at least for whenever we really wanted one.
Think of a book as another room in your house, a room filled with the most beautiful, quirky, joyful friends you could ever wish to find. That’s what I’m going to be doing from now on. And that’s how I know that I’ll never truly be the alone person I always thought that I was.