Loneliness started with the Gods.
She crept behind them like a shadow. Watching them, admiring them…. Loving them. She reveled in their joys, and grieved their sorrows. When they danced, her steps mirrored theirs mere seconds later. Always offbeat, always unseen.
One day she dared to touch them. To join them, fully.
And they were all forgotten.
The men and women the Gods so adored and cherished tore down their temples, threw away their faith. They abandoned their Gods without thinking twice, and the Gods… the
Gods were left with Loneliness.
They didn’t want her.
She left a piece of her heart with them anyway. An apology letter written in blood; a love letter written in shards of precious sorrow. Her heart was all she could give.
Loneliness found a new home among Men. They were easy to follow, easy to touch without destroying. She thought, maybe, they were less fragile than their dead Gods.
Some of them were. Some of them could endure the crushing sadness that trailed Loneliness wherever she went. It didn’t fracture their spines and will to live.
Some of them weren’t so strong. And the sadness consumed them.
Loneliness didn’t leave men simply forgotten. She left their bodies buried in shallow graves— they were so desperate to escape her they took their own lives in favor of the company of Death.
She couldn’t bear it. She fled, trying to spare them from her.
Her torrential tears still drowned some of them. Found a way to cling to them, in their hearts, their veins, their brains. Her tears were just as effective as her hands.
One thousand years down the line, a man played pool with his friends. They didn’t talk about anything heavy. They didn’t talk about his divorce, or the fact that one of his friends was moving to New York in pursuit of a new job, or that the other was about to become a mother. They didn’t talk about their past together, or their futures without each other. They drank, and they danced, and they laughed.
And at the end of the night, the man went home. He walked in his house, strode up the stairs, shaved his face, and turned down his bed. He completed every nightly ritual… but then he went to the closet of his bedroom, retrieved the belt he was supposed to wear in the morning.
He stared at it for a long time.
The noose it turned into was soft; an embrace from a lover. He hardly felt it.
Loneliness’s tears ran in his veins. She felt it when the people touched by her left. She always felt their loss.
She was in a park when he died. The pain of it crumpled her, sent her crashing to her knees in agony. Her tears erupted, streaming down her face, a broken dam of grief.
A different man saw her fall, watched her clutch at her heart, and he rushed to help her. His reaching hands almost touched her—and then she scrambled to her feet, leapt away from him screaming, begging him not to touch her.
She ached, of course. She wanted the solace of a comforting hug, a single hand on her shoulder, a kiss on her forehead. A whisper in her ear that everything would be okay. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, whatever pain eased for her would increase ten-fold for him.
It always did, for the people who knew Loneliness.
So he left her there, standing in the middle of a park, sobbing. Eventually it began to snow, a light dusting of white powder, and she forced her legs to move, always careful to avoid the few people still in the park, and she found a bench under a streetlight.
In the gently falling snow, Loneliness sat just out of reach of the light. Alone. Waiting for a chance to love someone.
Waiting for someone to finally love her.