Socializing is something at which I’ve never really excelled. Six months ago, I would have just considered myself an elitist, arrogant asshole and gone on with my life. But that’s not it at all. Sure, I’ve never exactly been Mr. Fuzzy-Wuzzy Cupcake-Baker Party-Planner Friend-Maker, but I don’t intentionally try and cause any sort of pain or discomfort to neutral parties. I’m not *mean*. I’m just tired.

Sometimes it just feels like the pacing is all off, you know? Some moments can feel like a thousand years of fire and light condensed into a glimmer of happiness, of emotion, that the world never notices. Only I do. Other times, weeks and months go by when everyone else is making friends, changing jobs, learning, experiencing, enjoying life. And I don’t experience any of that. Only the boredom and the drudgery of making it through the days.

Is it because I’m alone that I experience such a disjointed and scattered existence? Perhaps, I think, if I had friends, real friends, honest friends, the pacing might be a little more even. Less like an emission spectrum and more like a continuous one. Except the element in question would be my happiness and the range of possible wavelengths would be my life.

There’s so much inside me that wants to follow rules, that wants to live by someone else’s guidelines. It’s how I was brought up, I think. But there’s so much I could experience and learn, I could be so much freer, if I went my own way. But to understand what that way is…

It’s sort of like I’m in a forest at night, and I can only judge things by touch, by sound. And I want to be able to see, I want to be able to say, “This is how things are. This is the way the world works. This is how I succeed. This is what life means.” But I can’t. It’s not even that I can’t see the answer, it’s that there isn’t one, and yet I don’t have a choice but to keep trying. To keep failing. Even when I have no reason to keep trying, no reason to keep going, I do. I keep going. Fumbling in the dark. I have no choice, because I’m alive. And that’s what living people do.

Here’s the problem. I’m the person who needs to define everything. I’m the person who starts every proof with definitions and uses nothing but axioms. To me, there is no middle ground. There are the things we know, for sure, unfailingly, and there are the things that are lost in the fog of half-truths and obfuscations. But what do we know, for sure, about living?

There are things that exist. I exist. You exist. Water exists. Air exists.

We know they interact in certain ways. We have the laws of physics. So we can predict things. We can say “if A, with mass m and velocity v collides with a stationary B with mass m’, then whatthefuckever.” And that gives us power.

And that leads to even more, greater, possibilities. We can predict how people will act in times of crisis. We can predict whether entire economies will boom or bust, rise or fall. We can predict the motions of the planets, the stars, the galaxies. We have incredible power of prediction. But what is power without purpose?

What is knowledge without application?

What are people without direction? Without a goal? What are we, ultimately? And this cycle of life and death, joy and sadness, struggle and failure and success and promises and trust and anger and fear — what is it all for?

Let me tell you what I want.

I want to be happy. I want to be safe. I want to be able to eat a juicy piece of fruit every day of my life. I want color. I want the sky, open and free. I want accessible knowledge. I want to learn something, every day. I want music. I want a friend — one is enough.

I don’t want to be constrained by others. All the should’s and the have to’s and must’s. You can keep your expectations, sir. I don’t need them. Why should I care whether somebody else is happy with the way I live my life? It’s my life. Mine! And it’s all I have. So don’t you dare fucking try and take it from me.

Like I said, I’m not a mean person. But caged animals get angry before they get docile. I’m not going to be the lonely tiger at the zoo with sad eyes, who wishes he were somewhere else, somewhere free. I’m going to stay mean as long as it takes for me to get what I want. And I want to be free.

I want to explode.

Noise scatter my thoughts as wind scatters leaves.

Nothing is tangible: Everything disgusts me, everything pains me.

Every noise I hear once lasts forever, constantly turning on itself, writhing, flailing, but never disappearing. Noises battling one another for prominence. How can one concentrate on anything in this cacophony?

I cannot live where people are. Where people are, I cannot think of anything except how much they disgust me. Chattering about nothing, coughing and sneezing and farting and muttering. Yelling like idiots. Joking about things of no importance.

I have to find somewhere to live away from this mess. Away from the impossible ignorance.

I change my answer. I don’t want to die by drowning. I want to be set on fire so I can watch myself burn.

Does it ever bother you how far apart people are? How alone a mind can be?

It seems no matter how close we get to one another, no matter how much we interact as a species, there’s always some part of each of us that will never be understood by anyone else. Some part that will never be noticed. And when we die, it disappears forever.

Some people with synesthesia live for many years before realizing they live differently than everyone else. That they think differently than anyone else. Because minds are infinitely separate. The distance between any two minds is vaster than any amount of language can cross.

How can we better express what we think? How can we better understand the minds of others? The thoughts of others? The emotions, the dreams.

How do we break this ineffable loneliness?

I wonder, sometimes, if people understand me as I understand myself. If people perceive me the same way I perceive me. It’s impossible for them to, I know, because we can never truly see inside anyone: inside any of the greatest people who have ever lived, inside our family, inside our friends, inside our loved ones.

It seems that all of culture up to the present has been struggling with the same dilemma, with the same need to be in touch with one another. To express emotions and ideas-through art, through music, through literature.

And it seems that sex is the effect of that struggle. It’s the need to hold one another, to make oneself heard. The need to express all of one’s everything in any way possible.

I think to myself, sometimes, that I would be complete if I created something that embodied all of my thoughts and emotions. That if, in some burst of creativity, I could express my life inside my head, leaving nothing out. But I know that even attempting something of this scale would be futile. Because, in the end, all we’re left with are pieces.

Broken. Ideas.

Scattered.

Bare and cold.

“We live, as we dream – alone.”
-Joseph Conrad