You’ll have to forgive any morbid or unsatisfyingly demure ideas which present themselves in these next few paragraphs. Lonesomeness will do that to you, although it is often it’s brother loneliness that is more feared when we think of our existence. You can also thank one Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, although he left this Earth years ago, for planting the seeds of rebellion against my own mind as I work my way through his entire anthology of satire and disappointment at the state of the world in the prime of his creative yet knarled brain. Perhaps you can go lay some flowers at his grave for me if you happen to be passing by.
Up to and including this point in my life I have fit nicely into small spaces. When my small space involved a wooden bar and 100 different bottles of liquors and liquers (of which I still don’t understand the difference), someone once described me as more country mouse than town mouse which I still consider to be the most accurate depiction of myself ever given to me by another person. And this country mouse finds peace and comfort in the quiet of small towns and ocean waves, and being alone.
In one of the many brilliant books by Kurt Vonnegut which my hungry eyes have scarfed down in some attempt to fill the cracks and crevices of my brain with the greatest form of nonsense* a political campaign is run with the slogan “Lonesome no more”. Which, in my humble opinion, is the greatest hurdle in the race from beginning to end or wherever to whenever, or what have you. It is a slogan I am working my best to adopt in my time here. I conquered it’s brother “lonely no more” many years ago, long before I set foot in Africa. Having grown up in a fairly small town, spending my vacations and later on my summers as a dutiful member of the employed college students working through their summers in an attempt to keep their heads above the waterline of debt which so often swallows us whole, in an even smaller space and then moving on to a small college in a small town surrounded by a small group of friends to whom I probably owe at least some portion of my life, I conquered loneliness. In the small spaces of my youth I got used to being on my own.
My poor brain got so convinced at some point that I was meant to be on my own that it began to tell the rest of my body that being around people was too much of a hassle and that after a time of togetherness it would begin to search rapidly for solitude and the loneliness it so desired. So I have conquered loneliness. I have taken it in and twisted it around into a cushion of relief I fall back when even the slow pace of the country even becomes too much for this mouse.
Lonesomeness unfortunately cannot be so easily conquered. The small space I’ve fit myself into now is perfectly my size. Loneliness has not yet found a way to creep out and twist itself back into what so many fear. I spend a great deal of time alone, there are days I almost forget what my voice feels like when it vibrates in my throat. There are days when hiding away within the four walls of the one room that serves as my whole abode is the most calming and welcomed experience in the world.
It is only in my thoughts that I find lonesomeness, not in my existence. It is only empty synapses between the neurons which fire one after the other to send messages round and round inside this big ole brain I have, where the idea of lonesomeness creeps in. My body could go on being alone for the rest of it’s time here on this wildly spinning sphere, but goddamn it if my thoughts can be left unshared for even a minute. And it is because of the wonderful, beautiful, horrid invention that is the internet that lonesomeness can be pushed back again and again and again. It is because I can press down keys in what someone once decided was not a completely random way, to create words that try to capture the sparking of the neurons within my brain. To catch the messages they send on some sort of flypaper that becomes some version of what I send out into the void.
So this country mouse has become dependent on someone being there only when she needs to feel that her thoughts are being heard. In a way this form of egotism and self-importance, in thinking that there would be anyone who is willing to partake in my exercise in trying to beat lonesomeness as well as loneliness, has created a new monster akin to narcissus. But for now, one monster is enough to befriend at a time.
Thank you all for joining my campaign. Know that lonely is not something I am afraid of, and as long as there are still those interested in the words I somehow weave from the tangled web inside my brain lonesome shouldn’t be either. Also thank you to Kurt Vonnegut for making me believe I can say something without having to believe it is terribly important and still think it is worth saying. I can only hope that was in some way a point you were trying to make.
* All that we create being in it’s own way inconsequential to the goings on in most places around the world, in fact many of the only creations that are of any consequence in the whole history of the human existence have unfortunately been those that end the lives of others whom we have been told are the enemy so we take no mind in the stories of their being blasted away by creations of man that we have lost control over.
Han in Dagombaland 