“too much time to think is not enough time” (Jason)
7 years. Exactly 2,555 days. I believe that within this duration, I was accompanied by a consenting adult for a total of one (1) night only. And all I wanted him to do was hold me. Which he did.
I can speak much about loneliness. I can tell you how it weakens the soul and diminishes all hope for the future. I am living proof that the less someone holds you, the more sensitive your skin becomes to human touch. I can talk to you about my hormones, and how in my fourth decade of life, they are not entirely happy of having no one to brighten their day.
I can speak to you about how I have learned to keep myself company as an adult, and have vocal conversations with myself with no other adult to hear and engage with me in their actual presence, night after night, and that this suits me just fine. My children are used to me, beings having devoted and unconditional love for me, and inquire why in their entire lives, they have never seen me with a boyfriend. It’s much fun to dream with them about what a wedding would be like for me, if I ever have one.
I’m not a widow, yet tragedy has passed through my decades in various formats and messages. I am simply divorced, displaced and in a remote area, with obstacles preventing me from meeting the right man. I am not in prison, nor a clinic, nor did anything attest to institutionalized solitary confinement. I am a civilian, with the ocean at my doorstep. The obstacles are not my children, who in fact promote and encourage my yearning for another half.
It’s the digital age which has removed me from accepting my current social norms of coupledom, leaving my standards to be raised and expectations of what necessitates my satisfaction from accepting this other half. There is no other half; instead I am whole unto myself, and have tiny versions encircling me. I have learned to love this more than what I pick up from the auras and energies of connected couples. I have learned to allow the right time, the right place and the right circumstances to take place for the right meeting and the right man to enter my life.
We lose ourselves from ourselves so much to fill that void, take care so passionately to find the right person, so hastily, so awkwardly, and this is too wrong. No matter what we do, who we are with, where we are, how much we have and how much we don’t have, there will always, always be some sort of void for every single being on earth. The yearning to fill that void is what energizes us, what moves us, and what gets us out of bed each morning.
We need that void to feel alive. Without it, whatever it may be relating to, we do not exist, we do not have souls, we do not breathe.
To have a void is to live.
Written by Alexandra Hatzisavva