there's a certain type of loneliness, a restless, late night loneliness, when everyone else is sleeping, when it may or may not be raining outside, that comes stealing unexpectedly in, confronts you with the vast, incommunicable, ineffable misery of having a personal history.

 all that fear and hope and stifled dreaming, all that wrenching of yourself away from or towards other people, all the humiliations and the hurts you inflicted on yourself, on others, all the things that seemed to mean so much that fell away, all the fumblings after a self that you never became, how secretive you had to be about what you took joy in, what pained you.

the whole, cold kaleidoscope, all those interlinked moments, as an adult as a child, that only you have borne witness to, that no one else will ever know or see, painfuly bright and present again, the specific textures of a time, the light through certain windows, the meaning, just out of reach, of that look they gave you, or that clumsy attempt at expressing love, or the specific dimensions of a specific shame, its heat and pressure, all the horrible uniqueness of the ways your own life tasted, smelled and felt, the shabbiness of the masks you wore, your threadbare disguises, and theirs, come whirling in all their sad singularity into view.

what can alleviate that loneliness or console you? this being set adrift in the interstices of your own experience, of the depthless, endless shifting and reforming that you flit through like ghost.  

except that I’ve told you.