Member-only story
The Wolf Of Loneliness
A prose poem
Oh, to be low. So very low. The lowest. The low where you believe you have made a gigantic mistake. A life-altering mistake. You thought you’d decided wisely. Waited. Thought about it. Looked at all the angles. And then … this.
You had no idea really what it would be like. You imagined. You role-played. You looked at the downsides over and over, and thought you’d overcome them. That the good would outweigh the bad.
But you forgot — or deliberately forgot — it’s not the bad that gets you. The bad will pass, can be conquered if you try. It’s the mind-numbing foreignness of where you are now. The things — the little things — that constantly go wrong. The loneliness that you didn’t expect, the loss of friends that you thought family and “home” would overcome. And it hasn’t.
Oh, for a while it did. And then more things went wrong. It became harder and harder to find pleasure in being here. So you thought — “It must be me”. And yes. It is you. It’s you in ways you are only just beginning to comprehend. You with no home. You with friends too far away. You with that gut-deep loneliness you’ve never shaken off, not ever, not really.
And now, in this place, it’s back, front and center, like a road block, a huge lump of rock you can’t drive around. Not anymore.
