Lonesomeness

A feeling that I couldn’t find the root cause of

I have always wondered why nature paintings leave me unmoved.
I recognize the beauty in them yet another feeling rises and slowly overtakes it.
Why the city feels more like home than open fields,
why crowded spaces comfort me more than silence ever could.
And I think I finally understand.

Stillness speaks to me in the language of loneliness.
Quiet places feel heavy, almost sorrowful,
as if they echo something hollow inside my chest.
And then the question returns, again and again:
why do I feel this way?
Why does being alone frighten me so deeply?

I was not raised in emptiness.
I grew up surrounded by voices, faces, warmth, and movement.
So where did this fear come from?
Was it placed in me before I learned its name?
Perhaps.
But the greater question is not where it began, it is how I continue living with it.

Some questions do not grant us their answers in this lifetime.
We search, we wander, we turn ourselves inside out,
and still certain feelings remain without explanation.
When we cannot reach their root,
we cannot truly “fix” what grows from them.

Then we are left with only a few choices:
to feel the emotion fully,
to bury it and suffer beneath the weight of what we hide,
or to learn how to carry it gently through our days.
Not every heart is capable of suppression,
and not every wound is meant to close completely.

So I learned to overlook this feeling,
not because it vanished,
but because I chose not to let it govern my life.
It still visits me, quietly, from time to time,
yet I have made a kind of peace with its presence.

There is a form of healing that comes
from hearing others speak your own thoughts aloud,
from discovering your pain is shared, reflected, understood.
But this was not one of those wounds.
This, and perhaps others I have yet to name,
I learned to carry alone.

And in time, I came to believe
that the emotions which hold us back
must either be released,
or stripped of their power over us.

Will this feeling ever leave me?
I do not know.
But I walk forward nonetheless, and sometimes, that is its own kind of answer.