It's night-time and I can hear my neighbors' dogs barking, some in unison and others out of sync. What do they bark at? To the moon, to the night, to existence itself? Lots of barks like intrusive thoughts that collide and create the sound of the night, along with the cars and motorcycles that pass in the distance, the crickets, the breeze caressing the trees and the voices of teenagers hiding in the patios smoking cigarettes and laughing quietly so as not to be discovered. Dogs don't bother me with their barking. I feel we have a lot in common. I don't bark or yell, but I write in the shadows illuminated by a lamp. My act is similar to theirs and the response is the same: silence.
As I've been sleeping poorly and having nightmares for days, I avoid going to bed. Because it’s there, between the sheets and pillows, when my eyes can’t close the moment I cannot run anymore.During the day is easier to escape, I fall on my back to consume as many tiktoks I can in the lapse of an afternoon. However, this distraction is causing me to become addicted to social media, the lamest addiction there is.
The other day at night, while I was walking from class to the train station, and I looked at the daily scene of the city disarming, with few cars passing fast through the large avenues, with homeless people wandering through the streets and entering the squares to rest under the trees after walking exhaustively looking for a piece of reason to keep walking. the street vendors dismantling their precarious stalls, and the workers walking through the smoke of the recently extinguished grills. I began to feel my throat squeezing inside me and some tears coming out of my eyes, the first violently opening the way for the others to rundown as if they were falling from an open tap. In those minutes of pure anguish I avoided making eye contact with the few people who crossed my path. I refuse to be seen crying. By the time I sat down on the train seat there were no tears, my eyes felt cold and frozen and my mind exhausted. I slept the entire hour back home with my head against the freezing window.
The second time I couldn't escape this anguish was at my uncle's birthday party. After mixing wine and gin without eating dinner, I ended up succumbing in front of the toilet bowl. I have never been so embarrassed in front of my family. Three hours after I arrived I ended up in the bathroom, crying and vomiting while my stepfather, whom I call dad, held me. Most embarrassing moment of my life, I still feel like ripping my face off and digging a grave with my own hands to throw myself at.
In the sporadic moments in which escape is not possible, I wonder what’s this anguish I carry with me wherever I go. How can it sometimes seem so heavy? Then nonexistent at other times? Isn't it simply spleen? Or could it be something real? I’d confessed in the past my melancholic tendencies, but these tears are different, heavier and louder, impossible to ignore.
I asked a friend what loneliness was to him and with his poetic tongue he told me “it is like being an abandoned house waiting to be inhabited by the people you love or are willing to love, but left to a perpetual longing.” I melted into his words, he was right. I do feel like a decaying house sitting on top of a hill, letting the winter wind cross me through my big windows from room to room, freezing every trace of my humanness. Leaving dust and brown leaves sitting on top of the old furniture acquired god knows when, always threatening to extinguish the fireplace inside of my virgin heart. Maybe I’m a little like House of Usher, falling into the hands of madness, guarding over my innocence resting in a crypt buried somewhere deep inside. Or maybe I’m more like Wuthering Heights, inhabited by the ghost of someone I never had but somehow lost.
I am a loner, always been, but there’s a difference between loner and lonely. To have time to be alone when reading, writing, watching a movie, or doing just about anything creative, is the most blessed blessing of all. To sit with a cup of tea and just be without worrying about the short term and just immerse oneself into whatever world you opened, is a privilege not all people have. That pleasure leisure brings is as sweet as a summer breeze, but rare in humankind as justice in the capitalist mind. This difference lies in that, the pleasure, when lonely it never comes, it is not free time and leisure, it is a sentence you have to go through every single day. It starts when I open my eyes, the sound of birds singing together carry me through the day almost like my personalized torture, a reminder that even them have each other, and it ends at night when I succumb to an unmade bed. In those days I learn nothing, and there isn’t one thing that interests me. I feel devoid of myself, like a shell wandering around the house waiting for the dark.
Maybe I did the transition so smoothly I didn’t realize. The truth is I can recall more nights at home, in my purple bathed room, listening to The Smiths or Lana del Rey, or watching some sordid film like Blue Velvet or Christiane F, than nights out with friends and lovers.
One time I asked my mother why didn't she abort me? Stupid question of mine, having in mind that back then it was illegal and most methods ended with the death of the woman. She told me, despite not wanting to have any connection with my biological father, that she knew once I was there in my crib, she was never going to feel lonely for the rest of her life. As tender as it sounded, at first I couldn’t understand how someone so young could give up their lives for something like me, but as I grow older I’m starting to understand her, I guess it is a matter of time for me to do the same.
I can conclude I find myself in a bourgeois riddle of feelings, perhaps if I didn’t have the time to contemplate life I wouldn’t feel this way.
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