Loneliness is my lover.
I don’t remember how we first met; his is a face I have known since birth,
a smear in the mirror, a scratch on my glasses, never quite there but never gone either
All I know is that one day, he slithered up my leg and told me:
“I am the only man who will ever touch you,”
and that was that.
He is with me all the time, even around other people, waiting in the corner.
Those people talk in circles about me, and I answer, speaking through a paper mask welded
on by Loneliness’s own loving callouses.
Sometimes I catch them staring like I am a baby deer with a red target on its forehead
but they aren’t really there anyway.
Not how Loneliness is.
When I am on my own, Loneliness makes love to me.
He is skilled and taut in a body that twists and shifts with each breath. breath.
Loneliness pushes sewing pins through my lily wrists so I cannot escape, holes in the carpet
from the times before, breathing cold, cold air across my bare chest,
pulling my hair back so my softness disappears and leaves only stern self-loathing in a
schoolteacher frown.
On weekends he lets me go outside
so I can feel a cruel wind not created by him, instead made by Lady Nature
running comfortingly along the back of my neck,
slaloming between the raised hairs and goosebumps.
It feels to me like when you get into bed at the end of a long day, and the covers are still stiff
with the morning’s chill.
My friends should be worried about me, I think.
A lot of people would define Loneliness as my domestic abuser,
but Loneliness tells me to act normal in front of them, to remain swallowing bitter sunshine
with a smile of gritted teeth, or they’ll take him away from me.
Or they’ll never let me be lonely again, never let me lie down and cry in that bottomless way
I yearn for almost as soon as my eyes open.
Real people cannot save me from him, and neither can pretend people, and
I don’t want to be saved.
Loneliness is the only man who will ever love me.
Kitty Grace is a teenaged poet from Wales who believes in the glory of the written word. Ever since she was a child, literature has captivated her very soul. Kitty was most unsurprised to discover that the blood in her veins does not run red, but black, like the drip of ink.
Featured image from Unsplash.
