I have always wondered.

Is it the living, breathing human being that gets into my every pore and boils it until I'm charmed into a delirious other world. One where shivers are warm and the rain is mild and thick.

Or is it just the feeling, fleeting through my everything, a ghost of a breeze, rushing through me and igniting that sad-mild candle flame that makes me crave an embrace never to experience.

Where I live now, the rain falls heavy and hard. When the skies turn black and time kicks its teensy stone deep into the night, the people fade into the pavement and their homes. If it rains, they all hide away and the streets are wet and swimming in pale lights of lamps. Nobody walks, and the only sound is the soft drumming on everything, and the diving of leaves, down on the curve of a waft. All that, wrapped in a cloud-clad cover of night, draws a smile on your face. And as you smile, that feeling grips your heart, it closes its icy little hand on your fluttering pump, and that feeling of absolute loneliness overwhelms you.

And then, it doesn't matter if there is a face you see before you, through the curtains of rain, through the light of this world, it just doesn't matter. You will long for closeness, for warmth, and there will be none.

Ultimately, that must be the sensation of loneliness loving you. And you loving it back. Heartwrenching, yet beautiful. Calming, yet hurtful. Close to yourself, but locked away from everything.

I think I have my answer now.  It's not somebody to love, it's whether to love or resent the great Loneliness.

It feels like having run for days and nights long through forests and plains and reaching a dark clearing, muddy and green, swelling of liquefied matter. It feels as though you're standing in the middle of a circle of silent trees, ankle-deep in the uncomfortably warm ground and vegetation, looking around, eyes wide to spot anything but blackness. Bewildered, you mistake bacteria on your eyeballs for animals or people lurking in the distance. You want to yell for help, but there's no way of knowing if somebody will come rushing or something will come to tear you up and feast on your very being. Perhaps there would only be that cloud-clad silence without any repercussions, swallowing up your scream without an echo. Hiding the noise under the thick, low-hanging skirt, so it could be forgotten, and denied. Heart pounding, muscles burning, eyes and mouth dry, there you stand afraid to breathe too loud and afraid not to.

It feels like that, this loneliness.

Not that I think there are monsters lurking in the darkness, waiting for me to turn off the lights. I don't fear the lack of human warmth, not to be touched, or kissed again. It doesn't seem horrifying to imagine the burial grounds at night.

It's only this choking, this invisible, silent choking on words. It's this consensual silentium of the world, where you may listen, but never be heard. Where you raise your voice and are shushed with shouts. Where the subtle tone of your mind is the grandest sin to vocalize. It's offence, it's weakness, it's taboo, and it is mostly undesirable. It's too much, too boring. Too you. So you gag on all the soliloquies and ideas, you think and thus, lose focus. Focus on the great external mouse-trap, of the ever-turning wheel that is built to keep you broken and occupied enough not to ever come up with anything reminding of an original thought.

But, of course, it could be just me being silly. It could just be an egotistic notion to believe that any of that matters. Maybe it's a different language they cannot decode. It very well may be a tongue so foolish-looking and mock-deep that nobody understands it.

The effect is the same either way.

I forgot about the tea water today, but it was still hot enough to make a proper brew.

You should see the cat, she developed a habit of sitting on pizza boxes with the look of utmost patience and even though the whole situation doesn't have anything to do with you, it makes me think of you. An eerie thing.

But the weather is fantastic around here, so I assume your travels should be alright, that is if you manage to self-hydrate your way through this hell of a summertime. I keep saying this, but I genuinely hope that you're going to have a great time over there among the scores of people high on all kinds of externally and internally produced chemicals. And the music, that will be amazing for sure.

Over here it's only Florence screaming her too well-written lyrics and me lounging on pieces of furniture, completely out of focus, about to similarly join a crowd emotionalized by alcohol. I think about sweets to devour, smoke to show around in my insides, problematic friends, and you. It might not be a very sentimental leap from that to choose you as the most pleasant thought to entertain. And this cursor I would show you, should you be here, it pulsates like a minimalist heart.

How do you find the trip so far? Are the pals cracking jokes and passing liquefied extroversion? Are meadows and green-yellow pastures blurred behind dirty windows tinted by sunshine? You may have already arrived there, too. The jolly crowd surely is a sight. It's so easy to picture you, wrapped tightly in a vest top, casting that first, searching, cool look over the heaving heap of humans, wearing the smile of smiles. I'm convinced a couple of people mistook the latter for sunshine but didn't care enough to look into the light.

Here it's one of those Saturday mornings when you apathetically give in to the heat and just don't move for hours just to avoid touching the heated pillow of air that stopped dead in every room. I'm pretty sure the clocks are only dragging their metallic little fingers through time, too, for there is nothing of importance that we could miss today. I have anxiety slowly building up in me, filling my feet first, before flooding my body as a punishment for going among people. I'm smiling, though.

Are you gathering the excitement from the ground under your feet? Are streams of joy and anticipation streaming up your veins to send them flying through to your every cell? Are you warmed by the sun, the closeness, and the freedom? Make sure to take a look-around every once in a while, so you could see how you're part of all that chaotic happiness lighting up the town.

It feels so safe to talk to you this way, the sort of safe I'm abandoning with every written word. But it's time to stir the sleepy air, so I'll gather up my tangled thoughts and limbs and get myself set for the merriment. It'll be hilariously indecent, just the way I like it.

This last puff of smoke I'm breathing onto the sky, this is me trying to send this all to you.

The birds lined up in a tight circle around him, but neither did he notice or care about them. His fists grinding into his ribcage as he was laying there, he just kept munching on the throat that was still weeping fresh streams of blood. The part just under the collarbone turned out to be extremely delicious and well worth the neck-snapping angle he had to force his head in to get to it.

The unbearably hot and stuffy dusk air stood still all around him. Beaks chattering behind him, crickets going crazy on their bio-violins, and yet the descending darkness found him wrapped thick in a cozy, silence-induced meditation. He thought - maybe dreamt - of lives and deaths and cycles and then smells and tastes and how they intertwine. His chin, resting on the carcass of the antelope still, was slowly getting wet from that tiny geyser that just didn't seem to deplete anytime soon.

He was not touched by his mind's little entertainment. He didn't get upset nor did he question where did all that come from and why. He watched and listened. The little puffs of air rushing about invisibly around his nose sometimes danced into his lungs and stretched until they moved out again, stirring the short and strong fur with body-hot rushes.

His mind was doing the possibility-game; it rooted into the present and branched into the future. On each branch, simultaneously, it showed him how it would turn out for him to wake and move. What it would mean for him in the longer run to get a mouthful of fresh water first and then scratch a treebark only after. How it would mean an absolutely different ending if he did it the other way round, not even to think about the consequences of maybe chasing a lizard for a while in between.

He opened his mouth and let out a silent roar of a yawn directed right at the face of the lonely moon. Eyes still closed, he balanced lightly on the thin line between the two sides of consciousness. Slowly, sounds began trickling through the protective bubble of numbed awareness.

A loud bang in the dead of night; a block, with its many eyes closed save for one, burning. Fueled by memories of hate and love and dreams.

Years have passed. Particles dissembled and reassembled, and that mind, banished willingly from its flesh, found a new route back to this reality. And there he stood again, surrounded by garbage.

'How easy it was when it only took a torched flat to get rid of all the waste. Now it feels like it's too much, like the weight of it all has dented the world. Or just my soul. Who's to tell them apart,' he asked the air.

He looked around him and all he could see was piles of garbage, tossed aside, collected, and then removed here to rot in its morbid colourfulness. As his glance swept across his surroundings, he stopped for a moment to stare at all the food, at that negative of any supermarket to find. Nourishment, half-used, thrown away, growing new little worlds among themselves. Their smell vile though, all he could think about was the words of the big brother, how others of the same species would kill for those leftover family deal-meals. You know, to survive.

The only things that are capable of survival from a human's point of view are the havens of nature. Their trick being regeneration and reappearance completed faster than anybody could notice. Or care to notice.

'Just like that river on the other side, ' he pointed out. The air agreed in silence, being blessed with the ability of total and utter uninterest.

'Just like you.'

The river, sharing the gift of air's lineage, trickled on without a single care for the smelly demise that laid a few feet away its wet banks.

'The river is shallow on most parts, but should you step into it, the cold would numb your toes and the stones would cut your skin wide open. Leeches, they would feast on your life.'

'And should you ever just stroll along the banks, any rock you'd turn around unraveled slimy beasts of living things, creatures so horribly disgusting, you'd want to throw them into the water,' he explained, wandering about slowly among the garbage.

He was looking down, but stumbled still, not really seeing what he stepped on.

'And you know what,' he asked. 'I think Jeff was in love with you.' He just stood there, barely controlling the glee glowing on his face, as if waiting for the air to engage.

'But (or because?) you don't really care about music, do ya?'