"Boulevard of Broken Dreams"

"My shadow's the only one that walks beside me.

My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating.
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me.
'Til then, I walk alone."

Loneliness is one of topics that people who are experiencing it have a hard time discussing. Things such as a breaking-up or the death of someone close (see previous post), though they may be painful in varying measures, seem to be easier to bring up when with others. Some might even find it easier to accept and wrap their minds around these topics as opposed to their loneliness. Perhaps it is because the pain of dissolving a beautiful relationship or losing a loved one are stimuli which result in our sadness; an external occurrence that causes us to feel down. Loneliness, however, is greatly (though not entirely) the result of "nothing". Much of it comes from our own mentality; how we think. And since much of loneliness stems from within us, maybe that is why we feel it should not be revealed to the outside world.

Humans are social creatures and, as such, yearn for contact with other humans. There are whole explanations on the scientific reasons why this is so, but the feeling of loneliness, as anyone who has ever gone through it will tell you, is much different from, say, needing others and others needing you to create a functioning society.

The personal relationships we form with others (ie: family friends), no matter how important we gauge them, "fills" a certain part of our lives; makes our lives complete. Some people whom we may know only as acquaintances may not leave any lasting impressions on our lives and we would feel no different from the day we met them if we never saw them again. Others, the people we get to know and learn to love and choose to be around, will be sorely missed if one day you were to turn around and they weren't there anymore.

The sad part is most people never really know how much they have in a good friend or close family member. When they aren't there anymore, or as much as they used to be, we finally see how much they really mean to us. Loneliness is often described as an emptiness. I'd say that's one of the best ways to describe it. Loneliness leaves our souls riddled with holes once filled by those we thought we'd always have around. Often, people will try to fill these holes with some sort of paling substitute: work, athleticism, sex, hobbies, food, drugs, and alcohol among many other things. But, try as we might to convince ourselves that our substitutes are working, the emptiness remains.

As we grow older, and as our relationships with others grow deeper, we find that we don't need a lot of people to fill the void inn our lives that loneliness may leave. As relationships develop ever deeper and are maintained with utmost care, the people whom we've developed these relationships with make up a large part of our lives and who we are. While these relationships grow, many of the ones which have not been maintained or developed decrease in necessity. This is not to say that these people will not be missed if they are gone. However, people with whom we have established a strong relationship with help us to fill that gap left by the absentee. In the end, we have a few very close friends and family members that take up the majority of our lives, sometimes so much that we actually need to make room for other friends who may play a less significant role but are nonetheless important to us.

But what if you have no one to fill these gaps? What if you've allowed your relationships with your best friends and your family to wane and you have no one else to fill the space being left by your constantly-dwindling, once-steady camaraderie.

These are questions I ask myself often.

I've accepted that my feelings of loneliness are, in part, a by-product of my depression. Of course, it's worked at odds against me to magnify the amount of grief it causes me: It seems like whenever I find myself wanting company, it's never there (and my drop in self-esteem is partially to blame for me not making the effort to call people up). Then, in more rarer instances, when I get called by friends or whom ever to a social gathering of whatever sorts, it's usually when I want to be alone. It's crazy and it's one of the things my depression has brought with it that I hate the most.
At the same time, a part of me believes that I am very much directly at fault for my current disposition. At times, I've convinced myself that many of my friends have and/ or are developing interests contrasting my own and that I would not fit well into their new lifestyle. Others are simply too busy with work or with school. Most of them have found their own clique to belong to and, perhaps, I simply am not meant to belong to one. Don't get me wrong, though. I am happy for them if they are happy with themselves and the people whom they associate themselves with on a regular basis. However, I won't lie and say I don't envy them... and by "them" I mean the people who get to spend time with "my" friends.

I regret allowing myself to stray so far from those I love, even if it was a part of how I was coping with my depression at the time. I'd like to "fix" this somehow... I know things can never be how they were, but I'd like to salvage what I can from the friendships I really cherished.I spoke to someone about this and she said I should either join a club to meet people with like interests or I can go to school where there are many people in the same age range as myself in a similar academic situation (for starters). As for the people I used to spend much of my time with, she encouraged me to do the very thing I had been contemplating: reestablish contact with old friends and make an effort to maintain the relationship(s). Well, if that's the professional opinion, I suppose I ought to give it a try.

People we are fond of stray in and out of our lives; we can't establish and maintain strong personal relationships with every person who is kind to us or shares the same interests as us. The strong relationships are like houses: founded by like-interests or situations, built from love, re-enforced by trust and loyalty, tested in the fire and flames of tribulations. We need to maintain these relationships like we'd maintain a home we'd built with our own hands. Unfortunately, it's easy to take these relationships for granted. And when that happens, when the storms rage, the shelter you once thought would always be there may not be standing where you'd built it.

"Gone Away"

"And it feels
Yeah it feels like Heaven's so far away.
And it feels
Yeah it feels like the world has grown cold
Now that you've gone away.".

If I envy anyone in this world, it would be the people who have never felt the grief of losing someone they love.
One can appreciate the sympathies of others who hear about your loss. Anyone who's lost someone they not only respected and appreciated but someone whom they deeply felt for, knows that nearly nothing else can instill the sheer emotional pain and grief only losing a loved one can. In such dark times, the support of others means more than those showing their support can ever know. But the support from family and friends is not nearly enough to raise one up from such a low.
With any kind of significant personal loss there is a time to grieve, be it the stripping of certain freedoms, or the disbanding of a close friendship, or the loss of certain material property or the death of a loved one. We all grieve in our own way and move on from it in our own time.
When death strikes close to home we cannot help but be affected by it in some way; notably, mentally and emotionally changed, for better or for worse. Who we become in the aftermath, what we take from the experience, is very much up to us.



Grieving helps us come to terms with our loss. It is a natural thing humans do. Just as it would not be viewed as courageous to not grieve, there is no cowardice in grieving. It is a complex process that greatly varies in length from person to person. However, it is generally divided into three stages: Shock or numbness, disorganization, and re-organization.


In the first stage, "shock", immediately after hearing about the loss, it seems that there is nothing left to feel; Nothing but the unreality that something so horrid could happen to someone you know.
When it happened to me, the entire world dissolved. As far as I was concerned, everything that mattered was gone. A part of me fought the terrible news, kept wanting to believe that it didn't happen. How could it have happened? She didn't deserve to die. She was planning to come up north in a year or so. All the adversity we'd faced in such a short time, it was all supposed to be for something; a happy ending. No, it couldn't be. I remember my senses failing, only being able to see through my mind's eye. Visions of her and I flashed before me. Visions of the past, all we'd shared and all would gone through; Visions of the future, a future that would never be. Even in the following weeks, I struggled to cope with the idea of never seeing her smiling face ever again.
This state of shock can last from a few hours to many months. From there, one moves from the first stage to the second: disorganization.


When we say "disorganization" in this context, it is referring to the state of our minds and how confused and irrational our thoughts may be. In this stage, our emotions and rationale can be pushed to the limits; we may begin to feel anger towards the loved one for dying; guilty for letting a loved one die/ unresolved issues; remorse for things said or done that negatively affected the deceased. Also, often enough, one may replay the events leading up to the death, thus, in a sense, reliving the experience over and over again. Most people recover, but it may take weeks, months, or, to some degree, years.

Once it'd finally settled in, the fact that she was gone and I was still here without her, the first thing I felt when my senses returned to me was anger. Anger towards myself for allowing her to get her hopes up about a possible future together; for putting her through all the trials we'd been through. I later felt guilty for feeling such blasphemous feelings about us. I blamed myself and my infamously bad luck for what had happened (going so far as to say that if it hadn't been her and me, she'd have been fine). After weeks of beating myself up, I mellowed out quite a bit. A lot actually. I would spend hours on end just sitting and thinking of her and crying and wishing I could've seen her, spoken to her one last time. It didn't last forever though...


After a while, you will go through periods where you don't dwell on what has happened and begin to carry on with your life. This is known as the "re-organization" stage. For me, I would say that it took about a month and a half to reach this stage.
When I reached this stage, I was able to smile and laugh and joke around for real rather than to hide how sad I really felt and trick others into thinking I was alright. This didn't mean I was over what had happened. I was still sad much of the time but considerably less. One way I was able to cope through this time was because of a quote I'd come across while surfing the net in the past: "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." The other thing that really helped me move along was a letter she'd written before her death. She'd entrusted it to one of my best friends who'd passed it on to me the day after she'd died. She told me to keep my head up; to be strong for both myself and the friends that relied on me (at the time); to move on and live a happy life. She told me she loved me. From then on, I slowly began to rebuild myself, to reorganize my life after it had been shattered.

We are never the same after going through such a devastating turn of events. We take from it several things. Perhaps a different outlook on life (or death) or maybe the relationships between you and those who were there in your time of sorrow have strengthened. The most important thing, I believe, is you never forget your loved ones. You carry them with you wherever you go, their very essence somehow seeps into your being and it is through you that they live forever. People see them through your actions and your personality. That being said, we should do our best to honor these people with how we live, living as if they were still actually among us, never wanting to do anything that would disgrace them or hurt them or others.
September 20th, it will have been two years. Two years since she passed away. Two years since she's been living through me.