Loneliness is a Blessing

This is a song I wrote in high school. It's a story that I've never personally experienced, but that I have witnessed, and it would be hard to live in the modern world without witnessing it. This song is a story about casual and dishonest love, but it breaks in on the mind of the protagonist at a moment of brutal honesty.

Loneliness is such a blessing. To get lost in a crowd, to put down your stifling mask, it is freeing but it is cold. In all my past life I've only been afraid of being alone, and outwardly in shallow conversations I will still conform to that idea because it's something that people understand. But I can feel my heart digressing from what I'm screaming out loud. They could not understand, how could they? I don't even really understand it, that this great evil, Loneliness, could somehow be a blessing.
But at least the tension of a dying passion is ended. At least there is some kind of rest from exhaustion in loneliness. At least this agony is something that I can relate to. This is pain, but a familiar pain. I've come home, even if home is a prison cell.

Your welcoming arms! Were they just a dream? That's how they seem to me.
At the start there was at least some illusion of joy and hope. But she knew that I never really believed it. And she didn't mind.

So I resigned my hopes and fears, as she had done long ago, and I gave what was left of my heart to her, though she was just a mere friend. There was never any nonsense, no confusion. She took it only on the strict mutual understanding that I'd never get lost in love again. She took it on the condition that the heart must never beat.
From there the story is old. As friends we slowly grew apart, and we never did grow to love each other, we never were foolish enough to believe that we were lovers at heart. Our contract was lined out very clearly in her demands, she wanted nothing but the chemistry. Chemistry, what a cold resolve! But everything else was foolishness. There was no soul, there was only chemistry.
And hard times came upon me.
But when I asked her to take my hand, she looked at me coldly. She saw my heart begin to beat and bleed, and she gave me to understand that that broken heart was mine and mine alone. The contract was broken. The broken heart always had been mine and mine alone.

Loneliness is such a blessing. How could it be? How could I be relieved to be here on the outside on my own?
But loneliness is such a blessing.



A short (or maybe not) afterword. This song was for me mainly a song of bitterness. I looked around on people my own age in shallow and very temporary relationships, making the most of what they called life, but I was always an outcast. From the cold on the outside I consoled myself with the vengeful thought that I would be better off than them in the long run because loneliness ultimately was a blessing. Like the man in my song, they too would eventually find themselves in the cold without a friend because they'd never taken the time to love with anything apart from chemistry. It was wrong of me to look down on them as I did, but I don't know how else I could have survived. I retained the will to go on partly because I knew that their love, which I even felt a yearning to be part of, was fake, but my loneliness was real.
But as is often the case, I had hardly worked all this out in my mind, or any of it really for that matter, in the moment of writing the song. And I still treasure this song, despite the bitter spirit that I wrote it in, because it does still carry truth. Today the song inspires both bitterness and compassion in me for those who live a life with a mere chemistry-based love.
But the best part is that the story is not over. Several months later another song was to come.

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