Loneliness

I tried to describe it once in a more creative fashion:

It was far more pleasurable to pity and be pitied. Comfort often comes at the expense of truth.

And love? It was the opportunity to feel sorrow, to risk. Nothing more.

He paused. Did he really believe that? Was that really the truth? It sounded so dark, so depressing, and yet somehow so right. He wanted to believe that he was a martyr, blighted for a noble cause that merited some form of applause or recognition. He wanted to wear his wounds with pride, to carry the sorrow like a crown of thorns that he could say he suffered for the sake of something equally glorious.

But it wasn't true. He wore it for nothing, and he hated that realization because it was far more convenient for him to think that this self-crucifixion, this travesty against his soul was worth something even if was self-inflicted. It let him feel that he, and he alone, could bear something of this magnitude. That he was, if only by suffering, someone who did something special.

But it wasn't true. He suffered needlessly and stupidly, without wisdom and without reason. This was the bane of his existence and he clutched it with a desperate dignity, hoping against hope that there was a fragment of the admirable in his pride.