Never, again

Every couple days or weeks I say to myself, "I will not survive this lonliness." And then I do, every time, without fail. It's fulfilling at first and then disappointing, because in a couple days or weeks I find myself saying, "I'm back here. I can't survive it." How many times will I be back there? When it comes to the end of a long weekend I say "Never again."

But we said that after the Holocaust and then there was Serbia and now Darfur. Maybe we only meant in the West and maybe we only meant to our neighbors. Yugoslavia is far and Africa is farther.

And maybe I'm the farthest of all- completely isolated in the middle-of-nowhere, which happens to be the center-of-everything according to the news. Being alone is water running through the desert. Lonliness is the desert at the bottom of the sea.