103. Maybe One Day

His loneliness has become intractable. He goes to social events but he always ends up feeling even more alone than before. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. He wonders if he is just too strange or awkward. Or perhaps it’s his intensity that makes him undesirable.

The people he meets don’t seem to understand him. When he tries to talk to them about his interests or his work, they seem to almost immediately become bored. They look at him like he’s speaking a language they cannot understand. They respond with platitudes and try to change the subject to literally anything else.

He doesn’t offer any resistance when this happens. By now he basically expects it. It seems to happen no matter how much enthusiasm or creativity he brings to his words. So he lets them talk about whatever they want, and he tries to follow along. He doesn’t want to cause anyone trouble or make them feel uncomfortable. He’s sociable enough to keep small talk going, but it drains the life right out of him.

He finds it incredibly difficult to maintain interest when things always go like this. And it seems the lack of interest goes both ways, for the people he meets tend to disappear from his life. He feels no one cares about his presence one way or the other.

He wishes there was a way to interact more deeply with others. Or at least a way to demonstrate his value. But he doesn’t know how to do this, so he retreats inward, deeper into himself. In his free time, he stays home and reads. The people in the novels don’t interest him as much as the people who write them. He thinks the writers must be sort of like him, because they seem to think like he does. This must mean there are people of his kind somewhere out there. He just hasn’t been able to make contact with any of them.

Contact is what he wants. Or some kind of connection that is real and tangible. But all he seems to do is read books and write the occasional poem. He also tries to share what he learns, whenever he gets a chance. He thinks that helping others might mean he isn’t completely wasting his time or his life. And maybe it will lead to contact one day. He doesn’t know if it’s realistic to hope for that, but he finds he does so anyway.