anfscu: Okay, so it’s 2010. We’ve gotta figure out something besides an answering machine with no messages to show that someone’s lonely. I mean, come on. Re-encountered this while going through my Tumblr likes. What could this be? An open G-chat window where the last line is stuck on “You have just entered text” or whatever it is? Clicking the Tumblr red new post button and the window refreshing without anything new popping up? A montage of someone cycling through three tabs - Twitter + Facebook + Email - on your browser? Tweeting a question and the time stamp is 9 hours ago and there are no RTs, favs or @ replies? No likes on a Facebook status?  Damn. 

anfscu:

Okay, so it’s 2010. We’ve gotta figure out something besides an answering machine with no messages to show that someone’s lonely. I mean, come on.

Re-encountered this while going through my Tumblr likes. What could this be? An open G-chat window where the last line is stuck on “You have just entered text” or whatever it is? Clicking the Tumblr red new post button and the window refreshing without anything new popping up? A montage of someone cycling through three tabs - Twitter + Facebook + Email - on your browser? Tweeting a question and the time stamp is 9 hours ago and there are no RTs, favs or @ replies? No likes on a Facebook status? 

Damn. 

(via somethingchanged)

“Maybe I just worried too much about things. Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance. I don’t know any more. I used to know, but I lost the knowledge a long time ago. A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.”
– J.D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew” (via dinkenesh / astrophysicists / colporteur / unicornology)
“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be the one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists — reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself — slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it’s like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new… But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette… They don’t know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand on your shoulder send a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and tubes and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
– Notes on a Scandal (via scantmusic / jaune / mutations)
Tales From The Womp #1 by Louie Chin

Tales From The Womp #1 by Louie Chin

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
–

David Foster Wallace (via whiskyandwhimsy)

one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know

justhere: Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. – Albert Camus

justhere:

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. – Albert Camus

ashkenne / suzywire / longlivethequeen

ashkenne / suzywire / longlivethequeen

scrivovivo: Joel Schekman. sometimes you miss things only when you’re away from them ; sometimes you miss things only when you’re right beside them ; sometimes you hardly miss anything at all ; sometimes you miss everything, always.

scrivovivo:

Joel Schekman.

sometimes you miss things only when you’re away from them ; sometimes you miss things only when you’re right beside them ; sometimes you hardly miss anything at all ; sometimes you miss everything, always.

(via somethingchanged)

(via somethingchanged)

Otherwhere

buyhercandy:

Each person found the new loneliness both so unbearably alien and excruciatingly familiar, everyone rushed to seek relief by entering into a different exchange, and then another, and then another, until soon, all the individual lonelinesses were irrevocably lost in the web of transpositions. Everyone longed for his or her original loneliness as if for a vanished beloved, and thus art, the alphabet, and printmaking, as well as the media, sprang into existence early in this realm, and under great pressure, rather than at the leisurely pace of most societies, as these citizens urgently tried to find ways to describe the particularities, the densities, the textures, etc. of their original conditions. A crude version of the classifieds was invented in which people listed the characteristics not of their ideal soul mates, but of their orphaned lonelinesses. Very occasionally, a loneliness would be restored to its original host, but the fit never felt quite right after the extended trauma of separation. Very occasionally, during a transfer attempt, a host soul would reject a loneliness—its own or someone else’s, or the loneliness would reject the host, leaving that individual empty, without any loneliness at all, only to die within hours, and leaving that loneliness to wander disembodied through the realm hoping that some altruistic person willing to endure more than one loneliness would absorb it (the highest number of lonelinesses which anyone was recorded as having survived was three).

- Clare Bateman

This is so highly relevant to my interests, you don’t even know.