Solitude

     You know that moment when you feel absolutely alone? Not the alone where you desire distance from everyone else, every possible sound of human life - the other kid, when the pressures and weariness of existence lay so heavily upon you nothing revives your spirit? You desperately seek someone that can hear your pains and worries, embrace but calm your fears, and connect you with unrequitted understanding.

     But you can't because you've distanced everyone you know from your innermost thoughts and emotions. You are unavoidably alone, singular, dispossessed, independent, and unaided by choice because you feared the pain that any sort of relationship causes when its broken. All relationships end: by voluntary, consensual choice, a jarring break caused by distance, emotion, circumstance, or death.
     It's funny how our younger years are so sensitive. As children no one really knows anything and information is just accepted by the brain as it assimilates meaning from its surrounding. That understanding can change, but the impact on the brain is permanent though it can be, eventually, navigated around.
     And that's where I find myself tonight. I am alone, miserable, and gloomy, but I have no one to turn to because I fear the searing, unceasing pain that comes from the falsely dependable comfort of closeness. Once a string is attached to the heart, it is never simply cut loose, always ripped out. Yes, the relational strings we allow to dilapidate, ignored over time, pain less when severed, but the most robust, supportive strings rend the heart in two. That pain, encompassing the entire processing pyche of the person, lingers for too long, always sharp, sharper with time under the haggard circumstances of life that enhances its edge to break through shallow scars of only half-clogged blood.
     I struggled through my notes, books, and memories of the past history of the world. How a nation, people, or figure betrayed by the dearest love overcame this life-shattered, purpose-nulling, eternity-agonizing pain. The answer, revealed in stories, poems, and tales, is time and forgiveness. But that doesn't always work. Often the scarred party is so embittered the entirety of remaining life is consumed with bitter hatred, self-doubt, general loathing and anger. Alternatively, the crushed spirit whimpers and dies from the "broken heart."

I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed . . . The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead . . . I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. ~ Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe

     If the rock is angled just right, time doesn't dull but sharpen blades. Forgiveness is seen as a profession by those too weak to hold on to anger. Moving on? Impossible.
     Pain isn't a hollow feeling. Pain is the entirety of the substance, but no longer physically impaling like a scrape on your leg when each movement causes a spasm. Emotional pain is a distracting, limiting pain like a dull knife with weights attached slowly compressing into your heart. Always. And every moment of joy guilt, anger, hatred, and bitterness boils up against that joy from the unhealed wound that effuses pain as a well.

     That despair seeps into life and forms a carefully arranged, thick callous around any passage to the heart. If a lasso is thrown, rejection is immediate. If a stab is taken to penetrate the protective layers, violent aversion will directly ensue.
     All this caused by others.
     That's the difference between depressive loneliness and solitude. Solitude is sought to inspire, reflect, relax, comfort, and relieve. However, solitude is worthless if, even in the presence of others, no company or society reprieves self-caused isolation.
     Self-imposed emotional and physical isolation is not healing, but sometimes, it's what dulls the pain the best - though alcohol and other drugs are often abused to cloud memories. Winston Churchill remained depressed most of his life and became known for his particular fondness for drink. One in four U.S. presidents has been historically noted for inexplicable mood swings likely caused by depression. Whether those emotions were bottled intentionally to shield the heart from pain cannot be known because the individuals never expressed them.
     Abraham Lincoln, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me."
     Theodore Roosevelt, "The light has gone out from my life."
     Edgar Allan Poe, "I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."
     Another timeless example of trying to erode life's pain: soldiers. In history, life, and literature, soldiers vie against each other to live in the moment. Drink until the mind is blank. Gamble away the spoils gained in blood and death. Bury sorrow in the facade of tough acts of self-preservation. Chase death causelessly to provide the mind distraction from what it is too fully aware.
     There is still something to be learned from the past, present, and pain. Depressive solitude, even if not overcome, does not diminish a life from achieving great things.

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Agatha Tyche