Alone Again

It was then that I thought I'd lost her. The last echoes of her presence died away in the corners of my mind. It had always given me comfort. I often forgot they were there, but when I was lonely or lost, I could always reach in and see her. I could tell myself: “She is there. She loves you. She will always be there for you.”

Abruptly, she was not. I was walking down an alley in the depth of the night. A faint mist clogged the air, as it often did that time of year. I was thinking of... something inconsequential. Maybe what take-out I was going to order when I got back to the apartment.

The world shifted beneath me and I staggered, barely catching myself against a dumpster. I didn't know what had changed, not at first. Hypoglycemia or just sleep deprivation, maybe. In my thoughts, though, I reached out to her reflexively for comfort. And I staggered again, finding her absent.

I had forgotten what it was like, being alone in my own mind. I admit that I panicked. Any onlooker surely would have thought me drunk or insane as I lashed about, wild-eyed, as if the whole world was drowning and I couldn't keep afloat. In many ways, that is exactly how it was.

I'm sure I wasn't on the ground for more than a few minutes, but I only reconstructed that after the fact. I lost any sense of time or meaning why I struggled to rebuild myself. If I'd been in the street, perhaps a stranger would have stopped to help, shake me, remind me that there was a reality beyond the barren hollow my mind had become. In the alley, I was just another crazed voice to be ignored and walked quickly by.

How had I grown so dependent on her? I hadn't even wanted to know her. Not at first. For her to become so integral to me... Perhaps I should have been angry. A self from a decade ago might have been. I would have once have been furious to know one such as her had hooks into me so deep.

As I was then, though, I could not see past the mist, the dark, and the ever-sinking quiet.