Brief essay on solitude.

I’ve got a lot of friends, a loving family, work and classmates; but I’d like to highlight that I have a lot of friends.

Few are the hours that I can get a day for my own enjoyment, and also few are the moments that I can share with my friends. It is true that nowadays we can get the cell phone out of our pockets, press a few buttons and we could talk with whoever we’d like; or we could write a few words asking about their wellbeing.

It is a fact that in the greyest days one needs only to switch a few lamps, even when its light cannot be compared to the warm and brightest yellow of the sun caressing the naked skin.

I never liked speaking in numbers, and I won’t start doing so now, the truth is that I have got a lot of friends, they are a few, or some… that is a matter of numbers; they are enough for me.

The problem doesn’t reside in having or not having friends. It doesn’t reside in human beings’ ordinary feeling, but in the uttermost distress of the soul. I am a well loved person, this I can assure you; it is inside my ordinary and fundamental feel, I am a loved person. These sayings are without any hint of a lie. I am surrounded by people who love me deeply, but solitude remains, soft and uncertain; in every little atom, in the smallest unit, in the particles that go into my body with every breath. Solitude in the core, in the root, solitude that makes us slaves, but even more, solitude that sets us free. The one who lies in the primal mystery of birth, in the greatest of all: existence; in the most terrifying: death. And even when you won’t admit it, I know that each one of us, living beings, is always afraid of the imminent.

Solitude is generally biased or ignored; the interpersonal bounds grow stronger, everyday life, breakfast, work, the street, the wind and everything the world shares with us, or what’s more, all we share with the world. We share also our solitude. Solitude is found in thought; even when you’ve read such and such authors, and even if you set upon your chest the insignia of their thoughts, when you take it into your mind, and consideration, it becomes yours, and it becomes solitude. Even when you discuss your own ideas with your best friends, or when you accept theirs, and for a brief moment the idea floats in the collective thought, once you absorb it, it becomes solitude.

Many times solitude gives you sadness; many times it is necessary to find peace. Maybe we are all connected, one could embrace the sincere belief of a spiritual collectiveness, one could recite mantras or preach the gospels, but in the end it is always the individual who makes such decision; not the one of being, but the one of believing. It always remains in each one of us the power of choosing, the free will.

Sometimes it grows too big, too intense, and the body begins to suffer, sometimes even unnoticed – although in general this is not the case. Those times in which solitude is so intense, hope becomes scarce and mean. Routine becomes smothery and many times the solution is to escape to even lonelier places, may they be tangible or not, places of the thought.

Sometimes, the too intense solitude becomes a friend, whom we go to in moments of profound and distressing grief; it crushes the throat, and twists it in rage; I still don’t know why it would do this… sometimes it opens your chest and allows in the most pure air, filling the core with warmth and freshness at once; only solitude has this ability.

One of the liveliest memories I have of solitude, is actually sharing a sunset with friends; the feeling was just mine, even if I were to describe it a thousand times; as much as the best writers, the most skilled ones describe it a million times, I know it was just mine, and it mutates in my mind, and that makes it solitude.

Also this brief essay is solitude; even when you understand it as I conceived it, even when you agree with what is says, when you read each word you make it yours, and you keep it in your own being, and you understand and accept it, and chew it, and regurgitate it, and modify it, an idea, as much shared as it may be, becomes solitude within each one of us.

I could tell you of my most terrible grief, of my darkest hours, and you could give me a warm understanding hug, you could try to put yourself in my place, feel empathy… but it is not your grief, and I do not want it to be either, and I would forever thank you for your compassion. But it is my grief, only I feel it the way I feel it, only I understand its magnitude to the fullest, even when many times I do not understand the reason, and I call it once again, I call it for the last time: solitude.

Not even the word solitude actually describes it; it is Spleen, it is death, it is dark swallows, it is Solaris, it is swamp, it is extreme desolation, it is a man turned into an insect, it is the jungle and the desert, it is a big metropolis. The universe wrapped in it, and sowed together with its fine threads, existing because of it.