Loneliness

I don’t think that there are many feelings that are more awful than loneliness. We spend our lives interacting with people, and somehow we can still feel as if we are the only person on the planet at the worst points in our lives. It is a cruel trick that gets played on us, almost always at the point where we are the most vulnerable. I am feeling that way this evening.

Hal is out of town. This is nothing unexpected because he had been planning to visit some of his relative in Atlanta for several months. Hal’s trip was scheduled well in advance and I was more than prepared for it, or so I thought.

I spent the entire day inside the apartment, mainly by choice with the weather being rather dreary outside all day. I got a lot of things accomplished. Cooking was done earlier than anticipated. I even took a nap this afternoon. That was the first Saturday nap I have had in ages. After I woke up I was already in good shape to get together with friends for the evening and watch the premiere of the new Doctor Who.

I wonder now why I made any such plans. The friends never showed up. Not a word from them, and I realized I was too depressed about this development to call them. The depression quickly turned to anger at having built up my expectations for a fun evening that were dashed. To have called after them to find out what happened struck me as being both unnecessary and also projecting a need that I was not prepared to acknowledge. Whatever happened to change their plans must have seemed important to them at the time. Personally, I have no plans to contact them again at all since I was not presented with the common courtesy of even an apology phone call.

It was at this point that the loneliness really set in for me. At least I had the Stooges here with me all day. I was able to talk to them and play with each of them in order to pass the time. I think that without them here, I might have ended up in tears. Luckily, that didn’t happen. I made the best of the evening by myself and decided on an early bedtime. Hopefully tomorrow will be better than today, but I have re-learned the lesson that you can always count on people to let you down.