Collective Loneliness

Sometimes the loneliness is too much. It's a strange thing to be lonely among people, caught between their presence and feelings of intense isolation, of being known and completly foreign to all. I imagine, too, that the loneliness is somehow collective; we all know it. Our skin is a boundary. It keeps you out. It holds me in. I must not spill. And so, I am here, inside of me, feeling my essence, but I cannot communicate to you, the other. For me this feeling resides like a sadness behind my ribcage, an ennui that both struggles and sighs.

Collective loneliness. This is the epitome of late modernity; where the social has fragmented and we are lost to one another, and so we seek new forms of identity to signify who we are, in the brands that we choose, the logos we sport, our consumerism run amok. It's becoming a song that I'm tired of singing, and I'm not even sure it is the point. Yet, we have the credit card bills to prove how hard we try. Collective loneliness. Trying to be like you, trying to still be me. But to articulate the ennui is impossible, right? To say, I am lost in the pain and the impossiblity of this task, this life, this emptiness, this possibility, this chance. I am immersed in love and foiled by loss, these opposites have met and I realize... I realize it is all going by me too fast. How did this happen? What will I do?

And yet, the current edition of Business Week is sitting next to me on my table as I write this, with the headline, What's a Friend Worth? The magazine, of course, means to establish how compaines will capitalize on Facebook and Linked In, as they did MySpace and Friendster before them since, ostensibly, there would be no point to the existence of these online sites without the possibility of making cash hand over fist. But I wonder -- in a world of collective loneliness, what's a friend worth? I feel so incubated all the time with this hepatic endometriosis, I want someone to know what I have, to understand what this is. No one really can because, well, people just don't get this. In the meantime, though, friends are worth a lot -- the humble ones at least, who just come and sit, and wait, and wonder, and say... It's going by too fast. We are immersed in loss and foiled by love. Let us risk this life to reach for some possibility, some chance.

Ennui. I swear to God that grief always comes with whispers of joy. I fucking hate that truth. And yet I humbly ascede to its promise. Even as I fucking hate it, too.