Loneliness keeps us honest. Keeps me honest. Because I am guilty of language.

I am fluent in the silken tongues of self-actualised self-talk and pseudo spiritual gibberish. My whole world is made up of these words. I am a phrasebook. Awareness is a cliché in waiting.

Yet for all this clever babble – still bloody. Vertiginous. My head hovers over a vast, swirling, unspeaking ocean. This is the sea of how I feel.

In the end, I wasn’t smart enough for loneliness – just afraid. Yet all the while the awful terror could successfully obscure itself in the denialist contraction of language, I could go on functioning. Pretending.

But since you I have learnt something truly worthwhile. That even the most magnificent psychology won’t help. There is no trick escape. The wound won’t heal because it’s not a wound.

How intelligent I have tried to make myself – yet here I am – a pack animal – yearning in the very bones to belong. I am made of such longing. There is nothing of me that is not a kind of desire. My life is the grand sum of their pursuit.

All that stuff I wrote before. Maybe I was trying too hard. The truth is that the space between us is a chasm. I cannot get my head or my heart around it. I can’t incorporate it. The idea that you might live without me – or I without you – it’s a kind of death.

Whenever I feel this way a holy opposition mounts in my thoughts. The usual exhortations and admonishments. Gentle reminders. Brutal put downs. But the heart knows how it feels – and it won’t be argued out of it. Indeed, it is the only thing I can reliably trust. Everything else could be a lie – just rhetoric – but not this. I couldn’t make this up.