How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn’t have any substance after all?
Like when you’ve split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. “Plenty more fish in the sea,” they’ll say, or “You’re better off without them,” or “Do you want some of these potato chips?” They never really understand, because they haven’t been there, every day, every hour. They don’t know the way things have been, the way that it’s made you, the way it has structured your world. They’ll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don’t understand the history, the background, don’t know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don’t know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone’s alone in their world, because everybody’s life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.
Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.
When you’re a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you’re left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you’re just the same as everybody else.
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
[John Vanderslice] said, “If you think the Internet is making us lonelier, then you were never lonely before 1995.” That’s fucking deep, right? You know what you no longer have to do? Sit in your room with nothing. There is someone, even if it’s just some dude arguing about Alien Vs. Predator, right?
John Darnielle, on loneliness in the internet age. [x] (via herminegottlieb)
There is a tremendous delicacy in preserving Holmes in other people’s imaginations because there are a million different ways of seeing him. You try not to interfere with anybody’s image.
