The city lights flicker brightly as she looks out at the vast landscape from her apartment. It’s comforting, really, the sounds of people laughing and shouting as they make their way through the streets. Eyes closed, she lets herself listen to the noise; allows herself to be enveloped by the murmurs of the city.
Here’s the thing about loneliness, she thinks; it isn’t simply an empty void, or the feeling of being alone, and it certainly isn’t just desperation to belong to something, to someone.
Loneliness is white noise against a steel-grey gaze. Loneliness is the beating of her heat at 3am in the morning, every morning. Loneliness is a void that fills with people. Loneliness is his white blond hair, impossibly blinding as he turns his back to her.
It used to frighten her, to be so self-aware of how painfully alone she was- no, is. Memories blur, as do the people in her life. She knows the weight of it all, this shroud that seems to cover her and one she just cannot shake off.
She has loved, and lost, and loved once more. She has loved to the point of self-suffocation, drowning in her own mind amidst her memories. Memories of ones she loved with unyielding selflessness; and the one she loved just enough to let go.
In all her searching, he would always be the poison and the antidote. He was the knife that drove itself into her flesh and yet he became the comforting salve for her wounds.
The city lights twinkle now, almost as radiantly as the stars do tonight. It’s comforting, really, the white noise of a city so impossibly alive that she almost forgets how to breathe for a second.