Gad! What a lonely life this is!

Some days I can't stand being alive. Loneliness tearing, ripping, biting, gouging. Ah, but to tell the world, "I am lonely!": It just sounds so melodramatic and self-pitying.

I'm not the only one, though. So many people out there sitting in front of a computer screen, staring out the window, walking in the dark, dreaming of an unrequited love, watching a movie all by themselves, reading a story about a character who they wish actually existed, engaging in on-line chat or forum discussions, and just generally being alive and alone.

And what does it mean? Why do so many of us feel this gaping emptiness inside?

Prologue: Unity & Division

In the beginning, we were one, and, in that oneness, we were two. How we got here, who created us, I can’t say. Looking back to our youth, I remember love, I remember fulfillment. Since then, it’s been mostly emptiness and longing.

How we were ripped asunder remains unclear. In my memory, clouded by eons, I see an angry god and hear pronouncements of pain. The culprit was surely annihilated by such fearsome rage, but the damage had already been done. We looked down at ourself, and there were two where before there had been one.

Then we wept, and the gods wept with us.

Love, however, welled up inside of us, and the pain for awhile subsided. Clasped in each other’s arms, we could pretend that we were as we’d once been. Then—I’m not sure who started it—one of us wandered away. At first, as we learned to stand alone, the separation was no more than a few arms lengths; gradually, though, we often found ourselves almost out of sight before the panic set in. And, having discovered solitary mobility, we’d rush back to one another and lose ourselves in love.

The conflict, I suppose, was inevitable: No longer attached, our hearts and minds could no longer communicate directly. I was angry, my other self was angry, and neither of us could say why. We simply couldn’t find the words.

Hurt drove us to solitude that first time. Then we came to seek it for no reason. Perhaps it was simply easier that way—the frustration of hearing and not hearing…of touching and not touching: sometimes it just overwhelmed us.

Then we felt the stirrings of our first child. One of us embraced the life inside and thought she might be whole again; the other wallowed in bitterness and outrage over what felt like his second loss. (Always it would be so, and so I do not wonder that we think ourselves so different today. What might have joined us, if only in spirit, has only driven us further apart.)

Our child soon experienced his own separation, amidst a flood of blood and pain. Frightened, we clung to him and each other. His mother grieved at the emptiness he left behind, but delighted in his seemingly perfect singularity. His father simply looked on in awe.

Many children followed, each born in isolation. Even our twins, who embraced in the womb, came into the world alone and whimpering piteously. Only a few were complete in oneness, whole in solitude. We thanked heaven for their happiness and tried to learn from them.

As our brood grew and we spread out to accommodate that growth, we encountered others of our kind, suffering as we did. Our children, not understanding our—and their own—condition, and feeling only loneliness and longing, tried to find completion in these others. And what could we do but hope they would find it? So loss piled on top of loss as their mother felt they were each ripped from her once again, and their father, too, felt the loss, though to a lesser extent. Truth be told, he took comfort in giving comfort to his other self. Beneath that comfort existed another thought as well: that when our offspring had all moved on, left with only one another to cling to, we might have some semblance of the unity we’d lost and seemed to lose again with each new child that came between us.

Then, somehow we lost each another. I remember seeing my other self--not really even seeing because it was a sight I took for granted. Looking away. And when I turned back...nothing. My other self was gone.

I didn’t even realize it for the longest time. I think that maybe we had grown so used to the pain of separation that we couldn’t feel the fresh ache inside us.

Realization, of course, brought desperation. I was like a wild thing--rushing about, pleading, demanding, screaming, wallowing in a new kind of despair. No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t find me: I was powerless to make it right. Ripped asunder all over again, I wept until there were no more tears left to weep. Then--what else could I do?--I searched.

And I continued to search. Even now, I search...but to no avail. Longing has been my life for millennia, an agony of longing, so much longing that now, looking back over the centuries, I am left with but one conclusion: Unity, it seems, simply wasn't meant to be.