Beatles in the 1960s wrote:
All the lonely people, Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, Where do they all belong?
I found out about loneliness long after discovering how angry I was.
For months the only thing I felt was anger. Not for the people in the orphanage, nor for all the older boys who teased me, neither for any bully who infrequently only made fun of me.
I was angry with Mam and Dad because they didn’t exist in my life any more. Angry with Phoebe who couldn’t be with me. She should find a way to be in the same corridor with me, or take me in hers. I don’t care if she is a girl and I am a boy. I don’t care how, she should have stopped them from taking me away from her. She should have prevented our parents death. After all she always said she is older. And she was, she is. What’s the point of acting older when you can’t do what old ones do?
Bring them back, God damn it! Don’t stand there being sad. Don’t just try to protect me when in the yard with the rest of the bullies. Most of them wouldn’t care if I live or die anyway. They hassle me only to see you, Phoebe, fight. Only to see you defend me.
Who cares, anyway? All I care is to be left alone!
And then I felt it!
This is when I realised how it is to be lonely, lost and locked away from all others. I mean really locked. I mean shut all of them out for good. This is done only from inside of you. Only you can really shut yourself out of everything. No prison can do this to you. Only your decision. Your lock, your key.
From inside.
Slowly I realised that I couldn’t stand any change in my life. I’ve had enough. All the changes in my life happened at once and they were not for good. All change was bad. Bad. Bad I tell you.
So, that was it. No change. No room for any guessing, movement, developing. If things were the same, at least they couldn’t get worse. At least I knew what to do: keep everything out, shut everybody out. Any change would require my action and I didn’t want to act at all. I just want to lay somewhere. Stay still like trees do, or even better like a stone.
Science was the only thing that could make me feel slightly interested. And only because it seemed the only logical thing in my life. No guessing. Only laws. You follow them, you know what the outcome would be. Not buts or ifs. Always the same. Always reliable. Not alive one day, dead the other. Not with me one day, away the next one. Always reliable, always know what to do, always predictable. No change, no pain.
And then I noticed the lyrics of this song, belonging to a somehow famous group back many many years from my time, called Beatles. They were famous in 1960s or so.
A guy next to my bed listened to all this retro music almost continuously. Most of it sucked, but this song kind of spoke to me. “Where do all the lonely people belong to?”
Are there so many? It’s not just me?
I started feeling less unique, to be honest, but less lonely, just thinking that there are many lonely people in the world.
OK, at least I do not have to meet them. And definitely I do not want to belong to any group with anyone else. Share anything with any one. What’s this? It goes against the whole principle of being lonely. Damn it, can’t I be left alone even in my only loneliness?
It took me several months to come to terms with it.
All the lonely people, Where do they all come from?