I keep holding out hope that he will show up. I’ll turn around and he will be standing there with a smile on his face, leaning over my shoulder to place a kiss on my neck. I turn around and he is not there. I can’t say I’m surprised. He has been gone so long I am accustomed to his absence. Still, I can’t quit hoping. Not yet.
I will leave soon. Alone. I go through the motions: sweats, toothbrush, 5 minutes to check email I don’t care about, bed, fetal position, sleep; all done with a precision known intimately by the lonely. Am I lonely? No, but I am alone. Loneliness is not necessarily a byproduct of solitude. I’ve known people who feel completely alone in a crowd. I am one of them.
Monotony is not a byproduct of solitude either; it is simply a way to navigate the void. Void is not absence, it is a simple state of being empty. Void is possibly the purest state of being since it existed before all that existed if there truly was a beginning. Beginning is something that is only experienced once, just like end.
End (as opposed to beginning) is commonly recognized as a unit that cannot be replicated and, because of its negative connotations, it is the focus of volumes of literature innumerable. Beginning is obscured by end, but it is end too. People like me fear beginning more than we fear end because beginning can be infused with bliss. End rarely is.
Bliss is both beginning and end simultaneously simply because it is fleeting. If bliss could be captured, it would be marketed. Drugs produce a sort of bliss but not without end and consequence, which is why bliss will never be packaged and sold. Contrary to popular belief, bliss is not airy, fluffy, or cheap. Not all good things are cheep just because they are terminable.
Pain is far more lasting than bliss. This is a reason for the legitimacy of pain over bliss. Buddhism offers an escape from pain but the cost is bliss. Bliss, then, is accompanied by pain but pain can exist without bliss, though its effects can never fully be felt by one who has not first experienced bliss to some degree.
Beginning, end, pain, bliss, and solitude are all apart of beauty. Beauty is the hope that it all counts for something; that living is enough. I believe in beauty before all else. It is the reason I write, live, breathe, and weather the solitude that marks the landscape of my life. Beauty is why I both begin and end and it is why I am alone.
Beauty is not a value judgment, it is a realization about the state of things. It is like Nirvana but it does not require a certain code in order to be achieved. Beauty is an awakening to the fact that life is pointless, society is communally constructed (and therefore has no relationship to truth), and death is inevitable.
