Cracking Chrysalis.

We come into this world alone and we leave it alone. In between there is insatiable loneliness and the thought that perhaps if we surround ourselves with people, if we socialize and find love and family and friends we aren’t meant to be lonely. 

But loneliness is not solved by surrounding yourself with people. I’m not sure how it’s solved, or if it’s meant to be. I binge on anything unhealthy to make myself feel whole. To forget the emptiness, momentarily. I long for connection but fail to find it meaningfully. Or I share too much and push others away.

I find the grittiness of humanity — interesting. Intriguing. Inspiring.

I don’t want to discuss what, I want to understand why.

I seek other truth seekers: I seek to ignite sparks wherever a secret current exists. I seek the freedom that comes with artistry and the passion that comes with mutually ripping off all constructs to reveal the barest of souls, shivering in our overexposed consciousnesses, like a caterpillar in chrysalis torn from its cocoon just before becoming a butterfly, left there confused, vulnerable, victimized, fighting for survival. 

That grit, in it, the fight, the vulnerability, not ready, forced into the light, is the anecdote to loneliness. Flesh against flesh, mind against mind. Screaming silently, enraged at the unjust world, at our own mortality and the lack of time and too much time and all of it. That grit. 

The screeching, pounding, rocking sound of the underground at full speed, that we are all are forced to hear, rupturing our senses. Yet we all sit there minding our business pretending we don’t hear it. Pretending everything is ok. Yet everything is on fire. // Purpose is a construct. // Save the earth, save the planet. Maybe silence is the answer. The end is the beginning. The end of the horrible screeching we all pretend not to hear. 

I don’t know. I do know that being human is crippling even in the best of health and happiest of times. If my greatest fear is being catapulted alone into the universe amongst the stars and somehow surviving for eternity then life on earth is not far different from this scenario. We just grasp at others flinging through space on the way. If we are lucky, we get to hold on to each other for just a little bit. We laugh and throw birthday parties and celebrate holidays and promotions and milestones and pretend we aren’t being hurled through space at a billion miles per hour into the darkness.

And so the grit is embracing the friction of solitude meets solitude, of the ghosts we were before we were even born making their way through each other. We laugh at the irony of meaning in meaninglessness. In hope where hopeless is the default and the inevitable. And all we can do to escape our loneliness is choose to embrace meaning with smiles until we take our last breath or choose to embrace the endless void and fill it with our demons along the way to feel everything that one can feel for the blip of time we are aware of our bones and flesh. Or choose to wander alone and watch meaning from outside of ourselves, partaking as actors trying to fit in where we clearly do not fit. That grit.

My lips and skin are dry from this crisp fall London air. I’m underdressed and walking slow, almost going backwards. Construction rattles in the distance. I wonder if I’ll ever find peace on my own and I ask the wispy city-lit clouds to teach me the secret satisfaction of solitude. I am alone as ever and always, just like this still cool air and the dead leaves scraping brick beneath the soles of my boots clutching my clumsy feet.

I return to my hotel room and sink into my borrowed sheets, and allow my weight to be swallowed by their embrace, as I lie here wide awake, listening to my racing pulse, listening to the jolting hum of the refrigerator, listening to the scraping silence of the night.

That grit.