About loneliness

Before you read this and panic, know that I am NOT this down now…I had quite an interesting weekend but I think it has to go in another entry

 

On Friday, both of the guys were at their girlfriends’ hoses. I had no fewer than three freelance projects I could be working on, but technical difficulties were, well, bring difficult. I wanted t go out, but I knew money was going to be tight because I was taking a train the next day and hosting a party the next night. So paying the Fr. 15 cover for that folk music concert just was not an option. I wandered the streets looking for the park, hopefully to go read there. In a typical me move, I ended up never finding the park, but blundering into downtown from the opposite end that I usually come from. Hundreds of people scurrying around…all in groups. Why does no one else ever seem to be alone? I missed everything ad everyone. I felt like I was walking through water. I went through my phone list like this: “At the girlfriend’s house…busy..maybe….in Fribourg…in Fribourg…work person…her mom’s in town…work person…work person…in Fribourg…work person… aargh!”

I called the one “maybe”- a friend of the guys’ I’d met called Sergio. Nice kid, he’s the one responsible for the mattress problem but he can be forgiven.

No answer. Oh well

I paced around, everything was closed, and everyone was running around in little laughing, German-speaking groups, and-or drinking expensive beers. Both things that were closed off to me. My being alone, which I usually see as sort of an asset, suddenly felt like a crushing weight.

And then, as free-associative as this may sound, I suddenly understood why men pay prostitutes for sex. Not, or at the very lest not only, because they are sick or immoral or otherwise sleazy. But to give themselves the illusion if for only half an hour, that they’re free from this oppressive, crushing loneliness…