you try until you can't

bitter, god-awful lonliness. every time i hear a wind chime at night, it is because someone is brushing against it. every dark window i walk past there is a man with a gun sent to take me out for something i've done. i walk faster every night. every time i turn on a light, i get paranoid because with the light and the glare off the glass of the windows, everyone can see in and all i can see is myself. every window i close startles a burgler waiting to climb in. they are in the darkness as soon as i turn off the lights. every night.

this bitter, god-awful lonliness eats at me. it comes from reading, these days, reading too much for my own good. falling in love with characters, damaged people, dying people, girls i feel like are mine because they are so imperfect. if not that, if everyone connects like i do, then it must be the sign of a good author which nullifies all truth and makes the lonliness worse because i don't even have anything to be without.

i want someone who understands me, who doesn't judge me, who will knock on my window in the middle of the night and drag me out into a field and sit and hold me and confess to me all the terrible things they have done. i want someone who needs me, who misses me, who wants me next to them. the most heart-breakingly wonderful thing in this entire life is to love and to be loved. it is cruel but i have to know, i have to understand that what i want is impossible to find. and whoever i meet i have to leave unless it is wonderful. until i'm scared to death. until i find her.

what i want is to take a coloring book and sit on the floor. dump out a box of sixty-four crayola crayons and pick a closed section of thick black lines. close my eyes and pick a crayon and color. and do it again and again and again until i have a picture of stained glass. and do this again and again and again until the book is full of color.

the color isn't quite lonely.