Loneliness has nothing to do with company, it’s not about having someone around or not. It’s more about the deep bonds we establish with others, or with the world. It is to feel part of a group, no matter how small.
I’ve never been part of anything else.
I just felt safe at home, with my family, who gave me everything there was. My father couldn’t stay, and every day I notice he’s gone. But those who are here are with me every day.
It comes from afar. At school everything seemed hostile to me: the teachers, more concerned about themselves than about the students, each one with a particular pessimism… educating the children of others can be very frustrating. The other children, violent, with their sandwiches, the smell of sausage, teeth full of chocolate, open mouth showing the chewed cheese. The alley where everyone was hit in the playground. Groups of girls running and screaming like swifts. The children who never looked at me like one of them… because they already knew more than I did. I wasn’t. I looked at everything like a strange dream where I floated and watched, and from which I always wanted to wake up. I was always on the other side, watching. Alone.
Perhaps I was a repulsive, wise and observant child or, in other words, I was not a child. I remember that on one occasion my classmates accused me in class of something that I had not done and I used the expression ” May God not want it”. I was punished all day because they understood “I don’t love God,” and that, to some teacher at the time, seemed like a reason for punishment. The crowd is always right.
Yes, I was lucky, and I knew how to make a space for myself where I wanted. I have been a leader and executioner many times, perhaps to know what it felt like when others did it. But I have never felt a part of anything, I have never believed in what I was doing.
I’m still drowning in that desire to go home. To the fireplace. To the family. Where my fears were forgotten, even if I didn’t always make it and spent a few nights sitting in bed, crying and saying I didn’t want to die. My parents kissed me on the eyes. What a sign. The eyes that now see everything distorted. Reality itself takes the side of others and leaves me out. Always seeing shadows, not being able to recognize anyone in the street, knowing that what I am seeing, a kind of kaleidoscopic duplicated reality, is not what others see. I’m not like you, no matter how much I want to be. I will always be behind an invisible crystal.
Now they call it HSP, Highly Sensitive People. They treat it with group therapies where there are people who also feel this way but are not as lucky as me, they are not like me, and they have not been able to understand or manage it in the same way.
My cardboard universe erected on a false masculinity falls apart because a man cannot be sensitive. A man cannot be sad. A man does not cry or complain about his pain.
I have never stopped hurting anything. Like molars whose pain appears and disappears, but it is always the same, it always comes back.
Maybe these teeth are yours, or maybe they are mine, I don’t know, but they hurt anyway.
I’ve wanted to put all this into what I love: painting to move, and to see others move with what I do.
It’s a kind of self-portrait, and at the same time it’s not.
For it to be me, the scene would have to be empty, blurred, and nobody would ever see it.
Nothing is ever such a big deal. So, too, I’m glad I’m writing this for someone else to read. It means I’m not so lonely.