INVISIBLE SHEEN
I keep wanting to write about the loneliness, and I keep finding I don’t have the words to explain it without slipping into cliché. It’s true what they say, the stuff just hits you in waves and sweeps you off your feet. One minute you’re standing, both feet firmly on the ground. You’re making headway. Things are fine, even good, even beautiful. And then a wave comes and pulls you out to sea.
I think that sort of image fits well, cliché or not. The way it must feel, treading water, blue stretched in all directions, disorienting, disabling. The only sound might be the harsh caw of a seabird, set to the sighing noises of the sea and the panic choking at the back of your throat. The vast fullness, and yet utter emptiness. Water licking menacingly at your neck. That’s what it’s like sometimes here, suddenly and without warning.
I picture the loneliness pouring from me, seeking out any crevice or crack it can to escape; it pushes its way out from beneath my fingernails like tiny slivers of dirt. It overflows from the small cup of my inner ear, bleeding down my jawline in an invisible red. It forces its way out of smallest openings: through the tiny perforations in my skin original intended for sweat so I am covered in a sheen of it. And finally, when it has no place left to go, it forces bright tears up into the bottom of my eyes and sharpens my vision.
And with my sharpened vision I am of course forced to admit that there is no reason I should feel like such a black hole, such an empty existence.
It only ever lasts a day or so but I dread it, the sweeping wave that comes without warning, the way it demands to be seen on the outside of me, splitting my atoms rudely to push to the surface of my skin like a droplet of blood.
Oh, that was so dramatic. Happens, when you’re caught up in it like I am at the moment.
