the days continue to go on, time flying past, and seasons ever-changing, yet you remain the same. lost as ever in your own thoughts and shrouded in the loneliness of life. you once thought that the loneliness would be welcomed after being well acquainted for years, yet every time it creeps up it still squeezes your heart with a foreign and inescapable feeling as if you were meeting for the first time. while not a stranger, loneliness is not the friend you thought it would become, but it’s not the enemy some expect it to be. maybe a frenemy if you’re feeling particularly optimistic, but most days it is the imaginary friend from your childhood that you never really grew out of. always following you into the deepest corners of darkness convincing you it’s providing comfort but doing quite the opposite. its hugs aren’t warm but spikey and unwelcome. it spreads its bitter cold until it suffocates you and you’re sitting alone at night wondering why hasn’t it left after all these years. but then you ponder if maybe you’re high school sweethearts. never really growing out of each other, and too far along to become acquainted with something else. even though you argue and fight and threaten to leave, you can’t. because at the end of the day, it’s all you know. you can’t leave loneliness because you’re too frightened to experience the new world without it and loneliness can’t leave you because then it’ll cease to exist. in these moments you try to think of it as a friend, but it remains parasitic as ever stretching into every twist and turn of your being, spreading from end to end until it overtakes you. and once again you’re awake at night staring at your ceiling and asking when does the misery end and when does life begin.