The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 1

Earlier in the year, I wrote a soliloquy musing on darkness. In it, I described that when darkness fell on me during an overnight fishing trip, the weight of the world pressing in on me was enormous, and overwhelming. Perhaps part of being human is a fear of the dark...and that is all it was. But instead (and since I've never really known a real great fear of the dark), I wonder if what pressed in on me was loneliness.

There are times in my life when loneliness creeps in, and it usually has nothing to do with the number of other people around me. For instance, one vivid memory is on the bus ride home from Science Olympiad State Championships in 1998, when like a rushing wave I was struck by incredible loneliness, even though I had a dozen teammates all around me on the bus.
Or there is the time I spent a day at work chatting online with a great friend. We talked about everything. Then I went home and we chatted some more. It was great. It was one of those rare moments when you and someone else are so exactly on the same page about...well, everything...that the conversation flows freely and honestly, and never dulls.
The next day, I was back at work, and my friend was not online. All day I felt incredibly lonely, sitting there at my desk, trying to get work done. A couple times I just stopped working and sat there, staring at the screen and musing on the hollow cavity in my chest. How do you do a job alone today that you did with a companion right there with you yesterday? Even though my friend and I were miles apart during our chat, the social interaction had apparently been critical to my emotional state. Why was that?

I wonder, perhaps, if this is all just chemicals in my head. But I also wonder if loneliness proves I have a soul. Because some part of me, that day, needed to talk to my friend. I was at work, surrounded by people, literally hundreds of people, many of whom are close to me. I could have socialized with any of them. Yet none of them would do. My soul ached for my friend whose soul was a mirror of my own.

So I wonder: do we share connections with each other that are hard to separate? Could it be that the interaction of two souls intertwines them, in some way, such that loneliness is in fact the sensation we feel when that knot is unraveled? Perhaps the same way absence of a drug leads to a painful withdraw, absence of a soul leads to a similar state; we crave what we had grown accustomed to accessing easily.
I do not struggle daily with loneliness. Perhaps that is why when it does afflict me it is all the more poignant. And the rarity of it is what makes me stop and evaluate my relationships with the people I long for. Makes me wonder how they have become such a strong influence on my happiness. And makes me scheme a way to get them back.


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