but can we be alone together?

When I’m lonely I go crazy. Days drag on and on forever. Time dilates to compliment my emptiness. I get obsessed. I long for the love of a woman I may have seen on the street or in the café, and actually loose sleep over it. I devour myself. It’s a slow prolonged existential convulsion. I’m inundated with feelings of certain doom, and have nothing but time to think about them. I obsess over the idea that love will somehow save me. I look for a woman I can crawl into and go to sleep. I imagine the ultimate revelry of love and project it onto the face of every woman in the crowd, looking for a match. If I could only be in love everything would be fine, right?
Of course not.
When I am in a relationship I pine over the days when I was lonely. Everything goes smoothly and I’m content, but something’s missing. Love takes the edge off. There’s always someone to talk to, and the hours vanish into thin air. I sleep well and forget myself. I’m happy but nothing gets done. Take these words for instance. I wouldn’t be writing them if I hadn’t told my woman I needed to be alone for a while. If I hadn’t done that I would have even thought about all this. The way reality just vanishes into thin air disturbs me. I start missing myself. It’s as though love has a sedative effect on me. The frightening intensity of life subsides, but the doomed reality is still there, just under the surface. Even in my bedroom, when we’re making love, there’s a subtle taste of death.
Lovers annihilate one another. In the flash of their embrace they blot one another out like opposite currents, male and female. They find pleasure in their mutual escape from being. They escape being through one another. Each is the door to the other’s nothingness.
Togetherness is a pleasant way of life, but it’s an opiate. You vanish in the mist of lazy sex and happiness. Only sorrow really exists. Happiness on the other hand is the escape from existence. Let’s face it: Existence is pain.
Loneliness opens a void in your life that forces you into existence. Misery is the price of that heightened level of being.
Those of us who know ourselves, who know what it is to truly be, will never be content with any pleasant slumber. When a woman comes to me, to love me, I’ll know that ultimately she’s a thief. She’s come to steal my life, and hopefully to get rid of her own in the process.

February 28, 2009
City O’ City / Denver