80 of 107

Write now Article Tools

An outcast girl-woman with no place in the world, I have always been lonely. Not alone, just lonely. Like a solo oboe left playing a haunted melody that no one wants to hear, I was trapped in a soundproof room while the rest of symphony ignored me. The people around were ghosts, nothing but faces on the cover of a rich story they would never share, prepackaged humans freeze-dried in memory. All I wanted was to be heard, to fit, to belong to those called my peers, but I had become a nothing, a no one. I was a devilishly wicked girl who was a bound and gagged puritan. "Good" people were floating on meringue-y fluff leagues above me and "bad" people felt the simmer of the molten lava pits of eternal fire just from looking at me.

So I withdrew, deep into a place that some would call home.

Home, where there are only four walls and a yard that I had to stay in and nobody outside those walls cared about me, thought about me, or was interested in me. They just thought I was weird and left me alone. If I ever ventured beyond, sometimes they would smile and sometimes they would frown, but they were never looking at me. Maybe it was the way I dressed, or maybe it was because I wasn't related to them or their friends, or maybe it was because they were happy with how many friends they had and didn't want more, but I would never know why because they would never talk to me. The girls would talk extra loud and laugh extra hard when I would pass by, hoping I would notice how much fun they were having by themselves, and the boys never even looked and refused to talk and laugh until after I walked by, which was all very depressing if you are extroverted and love having fun and talking extra loud and laughing extra hard as life passes you by. And if anyone ever looked at me, it was only to tell me with their eyes how inferior I was. So I acted abnormal, but no one ever noticed because this went on for a long, long time, practically forever, and being abnormally depressed slowly molded me until it became my normal personality. It burned when others viewed me through this narrow view of darkness and that depressed me even more. As I sank further into the quicksand of oblivion, a silence, so empty, so hollow, so devoid of meaning, descended on my loneliness. What people thought of me slyly crushed my soul until I just sat and watched as the world walked by my four walls and a yard.

A little piece of me seemed to die everyday with those words I didn't get to utter. I got so desperate I would catch myself replying to a conversation with someone else, a conversation that didn't exist, as though it did. That's how it began. My battered emotions spilled onto the blank white freedom of paper, words, like corrosive acid, eating into pages with black ink strokes.

And life became a miscellaneous collection of observances and fiery explosions of tears and words while walking in the deep shadows on the edge of the woods where dangerous things lurked.

Learn more about this author, Alison Jerabek.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about Reflections: Loneliness?
We want to hear your view. Write now!