thoughts on loneliness

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When I was a kid, I thought that loneliness was when you didn't have anyone to accompany you to the bathroom. As I grew older, l realized that loneliness can be found everywhere. You can feel lonely as a gusting breeze blows by or when the sunlight ebbs and twilight consumes the sky. Loneliness is like a secret city, floating in the air. It is so mysterious that we never know when it will hit us.  

Haruki Murakami once said: Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

We are all afraid of loneliness, so we try in vain to fill our lives with various social activities to escape spending time alone. We purposely cater to the sense of existence. But, in the end, we always find ourselves losing our identity and purpose. We are bound by strings of disappointments and eventually lose hope for humanity. 

So, we gave it all up. The will. The struggle. In the darkness of the tunnel, we lost ourselves. 

But solitude is not something that must be feared. 

Eventually, we saw the light at the end of the tunnel, without crowds of others to block it.

We don't know when we started being used to shopping alone, watching a movie alone, eating alone, going home alone… But in the midst of it all, we also learned to heal alone. 

I believe that one day we will find intrinsic joy within ourselves.