by edith bruce

Created on: March 27, 2008

It's been a trailing persistent force that lives deep within the dark void of emotions. It hides during the day beneath forced smiles and feigned elation at the sight of familiar things. But under that calculated and pretentious exterior there is a raving perilous storm. I feel the cold wind that reminds me of a suffocating and lonely solitude. I hear the brewing lightning and impatient rain when I know I have to bow down to that solitude so I can endure the pain and confusion. Is the force driven by the past, present or future?

In the past, I have learned to live in a way that masked sadness, desperation but mostly the realization that I may always be alone. A life by the sidelines, hearing laughter not my own, watching people joke and express themselves to others in a budding friendship or intimacy. But I'm not a part of it.

Do I fear the future? Is it fear that drives my storm and empty voice? Am I afraid of showing others a part of my life or letting them catch a glimpse of my elusive self, beneath the smiles and feigned laugh, unraveling those twitchy anxieties to the truth about myself? Because I have a numb, unloving, narcissistic heart. I don't feel anymore. I've been outside for quite some time that I may have also escaped myself and drifted in a state of voiceless and heartless "bitchiness." In other words, a state of lonely desperation.

Presently, I long to love someone more than I can ever love myself. I long to exchange life stories with another person without fear of their judgments and opinions. I want to be free of the shackles of inferiority and loneliness masked by a self-professed self-sufficiency and independence.

Besides the gloomy desperation and smothering solitude, there is the one fear. It will cower me back to my cowardly ways and always force shame. The fear of being alone. It is the fear that I will never really feel the touch of another flesh on my own, I will never share in that euphoric blissful bond of friendship, laugh at myself and the jokes of others, and lastly, be free of expectations. The shackles can only be broken and the raging storm calmed and silence by a hopeful and slightly trite but highly universal cure: love, friendship, and family

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