Loneliness

I have an impossible mission and that is to find a person who grew up lonely and show it to that person what kind of person they might have grown into if loneliness had not gripped them.

The only character whose feelings I need to talk about is Mihi.

Not every lonely person is lonely because of failed interaction.

Sometimes loneliness grapples you unknowingly at first. Its insidious onset settles later on.

When you start realising what you are dealing with, it often evades your grasp. All of a sudden, you don’t know what to do.

You don’t know what to do.

Sometimes, it hides itself in extended hours of sleep. Sometimes you try to overcompensate by talking a lot - but it seems meaningless - makes you feel empty still.

But you might remember a time when talking felt as easy as a breeze...and it was meaningful, drenched with emotion, and valuable, uplifting.

We will talk about a small girl named Mihi here and her journey through loneliness.

Let's talk of kindergarten.

Mihi talked. She talked a lot. The first day she met Rui, she adopted him to be her best friend. They would hold hands, sit together, she would chatter on and on with him and he would listen to her attentively...she was in kindergarten. The next year, their sections changed, and then all of a sudden, when she was six years old, Mihi stopped being her bubbly self.

Mihi was surprised at herself. Then, childishly, she thought to herself that she wouldn't initiate a conversation unless someone else did.

Rui would stand with her to get up on the school bus. None of them talked. There was an awkward silence.

In class, Mihi was silent. Her pride hurt when no one would talk to her first. No one noticed her fading away, no one saw as she put on a mask, never laughed, they didn't see how curtly she cut her answers short.

If they don't want to be friends with me, I don’t want to be friends either, she resolved.

All well and good.

Till...one day, Mihi was completely alone.

She had no friends.

And worse, now she wanted to talk, but nothing came to her mind as to what she would say.

She was never good at small talk, anyway.

As she sat alone day after day behind a mass of chattering kids, she didn’t feel like a kid anymore. Despondency gripped her, slowly, but surely. An empty aching in her chest as she saw all of them. What did they talk about? Stupid topics, Stupid conversations, wasn't she above all that?

As we grow up, we change. We realise sometimes silence brings solace when sincere, and shared between two individuals who know each other well.

She returned to her home, told no one. The only complaint her parents heard (and didn’t think was too serious) was "I have no friends."

The worst hit her in Class eight.

She was twelve, about to be thirteen. It was her birthday. No one had wished her in school. She cried almost everyday at home. Today, at home, her father bought her a birthday cake. No one from school was there, just family.

The time took its toll on Mihi. Day after day of no interaction - something which she didn't let appear on her face or mannerisms took life out of her face and heart as she cried... I don't have any friends, she thought.

Her family, being busy, had never understood because, honestly, they didn't really know what she was going through.

When her father got a camera out and told the crying Mihi to "smile", the despondency scourged a hole in her.

She smiled, hiding her darkness that was clawing and gnawing her soul within her.

No one understood.

No one could tell her what to do.

When they looked back in the past, they would see the smile in the form of facades in the old pictures.

Pictures with a smile, that hid the darkness.

Because, what is a smile on a lonely girl if not to hide the truth beneath it? No sign of torture was there in her eyes as she smiled.

But doesn't this very thing claw its way into her mind and feeling?

Mihi gradually came to think, "What does happiness truly feel like?"

She was fairly good at her studies. She knew what the merit of achievement felt like. What respect, curiosity, passion felt like.

But pure, unadulterated happiness?

She didn’t know.

Did she get used to it?

No. She was still tormented, sometimes by the weirdness of a silence that wasn't welcome, or the inability to express to her extroverted friends (she made a friend or two after class 6) the state of her mind, who after that left her to her own devices.

She lost a friend or two that she loved. They disappeared on her suddenly. Thought she was too - and she dreaded the word - boring.

She was sensitive. Too much, you could say. Gradually, she lost that.

Little by little, she became flexible. She made small talk. She smiled when someone said something funny, said her thoughts out loud - provided she had thoughts (mostly she would have been blank). She became emotionally intelligent.

Later on in life, she self diagnosed herself. She must have had social anxiety.

What she promised to herself was this, the next time - if there was a next time - this happened, she would seek treatment.

She lost her sensitivity though.

The loneliness made her afraid. Being afraid at first, reluctant later, she made friends - good chaps they were - but she couldn't love them like she used to love.

It made her shallower. Because it was easy. She could be complacent. It was comfortable.

The scary thing is that, I don’t exactly know what happened to Mihi after that.

She is now a part of the bustling crowd, working her way through, like everyone else.

But I do know one thing.

The loneliness may have gone, but it left her a different person.

And that may not be a better one.

The point?

This is but a cautionary tale.

Look after those kids who are quiet.

You will never know if there was a complaint at all.

Because you will never hear a complaint from them.

Thank you for reading and understanding.