The
Phantom will Grip You
“Where
do all the lonely people come from?” –The Beatles (Eleanor Rigby)
Nobody warned him about this pain or how it
sometimes feels like he is looking at his life from the bottom of a deep well.
Where did this dark phantom come sweeping out from? How could one person knock the wind out of
the very core of his being? Why does one human get to hold so much power? He
can’t fight it, so he gives in for just a minute. He becomes one of the many walking souls in
search of something…of anything, to define a more profound purpose in life.
“Loneliness
cries deep from my soul, keeps trying to tell me about the world growing so
cold”
—Grand Funk Railroad (Loneliness)
All of the sudden a cold feeling grips his heart and
tears through his stomach. His head hurts from the thoughts of why he is
alone. Then he starts to rationalize. He
deserves to be alone, right? After all, he’s not that attractive or smart or
funny. He calms down again. Now that he
has a full understanding of himself, well, it’s okay to be alone now. He can
find a little solace in knowing that he should be alone. In fact, he almost
deserves to be alone. He just needs to find out how to handle that now.
“Please
be lonely without me”—Quietdrive (Starbright)
Then comes the anger—the child of loneliness. While
anger is a product of loneliness, it can often be found that loneliness is born
of heartache. He drops to his knees with
tears in his eyes and decides to wish loneliness upon the one who has left
him. He figures if he wished loneliness
upon her, then he wouldn’t be alone in the world. If loneliness was going to sit holding him in
the palm of its hand, well he wasn’t going to be alone in that. He wanted loneliness’
hands tightly wound around the waist of the heartbreaker—the one person he
trusted, because loneliness hurts. He
was unspeakably fearful that he was alone in his feelings of loneliness. Those are
intense layers of emotion that the phantom is just relishing over. It’s the pinnacle of pain. The world is
starting to seem pretty grim, and all of the sudden he sees this pool beneath
him. He looks up at that sneering phantom, laughing so gleefully at how far he
has fallen. “What is that black liquid?
What are you going to do to me now?” The
phantom looked him over, up and down, with a pondering look in his eye. “Ah, you see, it is not what I will do to you. For it is your choices, kind sir, and your will to survive,
that determine whether that pool is for you to swim in. As I grow bigger, your
time grows smaller. You must figure out
how you will spend your time, and you must decide soon. That is all I shall
say, for I do delight in your company.”
“So
when your hope’s on fire/but you know your desire/don’t hold a glass over the
flame/don’t let your heart grow cold” –Mumford and Sons (Hopeless Wanderer)
He finds himself looking beyond his heartache, to
the things around him that don’t remind him of her. He turns to the people who love him and remembers
the feeling of laughter. To his
surprise, people want to listen when he’s sad, because they care. He refocuses his dreams and pushes past the
feelings of self-doubt. He recognizes
that he actually has a pretty damn charming sense of humor and cleans up well. He isn’t ready to close his heart or let it
grow cold; he’s still chasing passion and no phantom of loneliness will hold
him down. He might be haunted in the wee
hours of nighttime by his past, and that may ache sometimes, but there is no
way he would let himself drown in a pool of depression. He finds himself pretty clever and, as it
turns out, being alone isn’t so bad after all. He goes where he wants without
having to report back to anyone, and he can get lost in his mind for hours
without being questioned about what he’s thinking about. So, yes, though
loneliness may try to sweep in from time-to-time, there was no way it would
win.
“But
what if I do win? You know what happened to the last guy? It was such a sad
song to sing, but I loved his company dearly too.” Said the phantom, “Oh, yes.
He got a glimmer of hope in his eye, much like you have. His wasn’t quite as
strong though, so I grew just a little bit bigger and held a little bit
tighter, and I won.”
“We
all have these things inside that no one else can see, they hold us down like
anchors; they drown us out at sea.”—Bring Me the Horizon (Chelsea Smile)
The phantom saw him. He thought back only a few
months and remembered that man. Loneliness had swiftly risen after his father
had passed away. He grasped for hope and happiness. He looked for it in bottles
and pipes, but to no avail. He couldn’t find it in the arms of women he barely
knew nor could he find solace in his one sibling, who he had grown apart from
as an adult. His parents had divorced when he was a teenager—he grew close to
his father, while his sister took to his mother. The family was estranged, and
now he felt abandoned. So, as loneliness grew the man decided to fall into the
pool and was slowly drowning every day. Soon he would grab for the rope; but
let us not speak of the rope for at that point many are beyond repair.
“This is for the ones who stand, for the ones who try again, for
the ones who need a hand, for the ones that think they can.” –Greg Laswell (It
Comes and Goes [In Waves])
And so you see, loneliness took two men
in drastically different directions.
Through his heartache and pain, the first man found his way out through
hope. He realized that there was more to
life than a relationship, even when a broken heart can leave your chest heaving
deeply and tears flow for hours. It
often feels as if nobody can identify with such strong emotions, but this man
found that he could rise from the ashes of pain and rebuild himself. The other
man was not so lucky. Loneliness grew so
daunting that he fell into a pool of depression that anchored his emotions to a
point of no return. Recognize this; the
world is not black and white. There are
not just two paths where loneliness can take a man, for he loves to stretch the
pain, leave and come back, and can resurface at any point in life. Loneliness is a constant threat, but should
not be a constant fear.
