not quite fiction (part 5)
(april 13, 2002)

listening: fast as you can fiona apple, live on two legs pearl jam
reading: the slate diaries

part 5

How does loneliness work? How does it strike even when you're in the middle of a crowd, and the next moment you feel like no one who knows you, knows you at all? It is a selfish thought. Why would anyone care that much about you? Why would they need to know about your demons and the voices in your head? The fact that they know your name and where you went to school should be good enough. Stop asking for too much.

You don't deserve loneliness, which doesn't quite have the same meaning with 'You don't deserve to be lonely', which is what people in the movies usually say in the beginning of a blooming romance. Actually it's quite the reverse.

But it's hard not to feel entitled to loneliness when everyone else seems to have a different state of mind than your fucked-up one. You cannot even begin to fathom how normal people do things normally. Normal was so long ago that you've forgotten. Their ridiculously casual response towards everything is, well, ridiculous to you. How can other people not want to wash their hands endlessly? How can other people not think that the world will go to hell in a basket if they don't rewrite their sentences? You no longer understand their motives. It would probably be like an insect thinking, how ridiculous is it to be a fish? What were they thinking, living in water full-time? You simply cannot imagine how other people could behave the way they do. What were they thinking?

I guess when you start to feel different from your own species, you're entitled to at least some right to feel lonely.

I have cried a lot of nights because of the mess that I had become. And a lot of days, too. Thing is, that was about all I could do about this whole fucked up mess. I couldn't tell anyone else because even I thought spending two hours in the bathroom, not because you just like killing time in the bathtub with a magazine and bubbly bath, but because you simply have to, was just plain crazy. Imagine what a more sane person, like your mom or dad, would think of that. Imagine how hard it was to keep hiding these things from people you live under one roof with, like your mom and dad, so they wouldn't have to think of it.

Imagine how lonely it was, in my own house. It was a good thing the house had doors and walls and I had my own room. Being lonely is so much easier when you're alone.

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previous entry: not quite fiction (pt4) (april 13, 2002)