An Onanist’s Guide to Loneliness

2022-06-11

"Someone brought wild flowers home, and their pungent sweetness was a trauma and I walked naked in the house, till I threw them into a bin with three Hail Mary’s." Self-gratification is a lonely enterprise packed with people. It is our encounter with fantasies but starts with a conversation with our loneliness. We are often left alone, or are merely alone. While the world celebrates together, we are left with an aching need to connect. In reaching out, we reach in; ...

"Someone brought wild flowers home,

and their pungent sweetness was a trauma

and I walked naked in the house, till I threw

them into a bin with three Hail Mary’s."

Self-gratification is a lonely enterprise packed with people. It is our encounter with fantasies but starts with a conversation with our loneliness.

We are often left alone, or are merely alone. While the world celebrates together, we are left with an aching need to connect. In reaching out, we reach in; in finding purpose we find pudenda; while banishing wayward thoughts we find the wilderness of brambles.

There are ways to be, and be with, our best selves. As we explore our minds with books, or extrapolate our feelings to film characters, or discover levitation with music. But when we want everything together, bunched together with a promise of iridescent colours, where our agonies sing, where our driest lands grow moist enough for spring, when we know we have visitation rights to heaven - that’s when we choose ourselves over others.

To say it’s pleasure on tap or bliss in passing is to miss the point. The enormity of an intimate relationship with ourselves just cannot ever be undermined. For those short moments of ecstasy make us forget - however briefly - the extremity of the barrenness which invariably is the bane of our lives.

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