The days grow shorter, sunlight becomes scarce.
As the memories of summer recede and fade away into distant dreams
As the season changes from wandering outside to inside
A gripping sense of loneliness creeps in.

The disparity of the urban apparatus becomes ever so clear
Close and yet so distant.
Logic, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing
Loneliness cuts deep.
The city grows colder.

And then I go out.
I walk, I roam.
As I walk, I forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.
I dissolve.
The heart blooms, like the lotus blooms in the mud.

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"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.

Though it feels entirely isolating, a private burden no one else could possibly experience or share, it is in reality a communal state, inhabited by many people.

Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

~ Laing, The Lonely City

All experience, however confused or on the negative spectrum, tainted by the darkness, is actually a gift that has yet to be discovered. To avoid it is to strengthen its grasp over us.

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