Loneliness

I've been thinking a lot lately about loneliness, feeling it just as much to a certain extent. A gently aching hollow within my insidey parts. I stand amongst friends and family and despite all the love in my life I still quite often feel alone.

For a long time this vexed me. It's not always been the case. I've on many occasions found people or groups that I felt like I completely belonged. As of right now though, I don't. Not really. I have a my toe poked into a number of different communities. I have a handful of contacts in the theater community, in the gaming community, amongst writers, teachers, drunks, madmen, and spiritual seekers. I have friends all over the place. And given my potentially offensive nature I'm generally pretty good at keeping the relationship. Or at the very least keeping myself amusing enough to make up for it.

My comfortableness with alone time seems to vary wildly. Sometimes I can go for days with minimal interactions. Other times I'll spend days without a moment to my self that I'm not asleep. I tend to do better when I have a certain amount of time by myself. But the need for time on your own is something I understand deeply.

I know cause I'm terrible about giving myself enough alone time. I agree to do too much. I work myself until I burn out, and then once I've recovered from the burnout I agree to do enough things that I'm really spending my life oscillating between burning out and recovering from burn out. It's a cycle that I know I need to get better about but honestly have troubles with. But that's not what I need to write about.

I'm lonely. And in the way that no real amount of company will make any dent. It's the grim hunger of the heart. An emptiness that grasps and yearns for something that may or may not exist. It's maddening at times. But thankfully I have a fairly respectable resistance to madness.

So I play the drum. I stretch paper thin madness over the hole in my heart and hope that the ache of fingers across it, the sharp pangs of the drumbeat, is worth the beauty of the music.