Looking at life objectively, I ought to have nothing to complain about.

I live independently, with no one to boss me around or restrict my freedom. I have a good apartment in a good neighbourhood in a city I love. My job provides both satisfying work and the income for a very comfortable lifestyle.

And yet.....

I wonder what it would be like to hold hands, to be smiled at fondly, to have someone's head on my shoulder. I wonder what it would be like to sleep with someone who really loved me instead of filthy hired scuffles at intervals of months.

When I do not think of these things I am happy. But reminders cannot be resisted forever. I can at best avoid reading books or watching movies or TV shows with romantic themes, and I do this, but the sight, the sight is ever before me.

The most painful sight is that of an apparently happy young couple. I may be sitting, alone, reading a book on the subway, look up, and see the space between their lips vanish. It is then that pain hits me like a knife edge.

It is the vision of a caring I have never known, the softness of a touch I have never felt, an intimacy I've been barred from. Eyes wink, but they never wink for me. Lips smile, but they never smile for me. Hands touch, but they never touch me.

I tell myself, or try to tell myself, that love is not everything, that in affairs of the heart there is as much pain as there is joy, abuses and divorces show their ruins all around me. I tell myself that living alone contentedly is the first prerequisite for a successful relationship, that neediness and vulnerability are the worst of turnoffs.

Yet the longing within me does not listen to reason. It yearns, endlessly yearns, for a happiness that seems to lie in the experience of all but mine. It is a yearning that has only become stronger as I've grown older, whose power over my happiness is sometimes nearly absolute.

I do my work , I read my books, I take my classes, I head to my social activities. There are people in my life, people I laugh with, people I debate with, people I dance with, people I work with. Yet no one knows who I truly am. No one has seen the inside. Sometimes it is moody and filled with neurotic despair; other times it is fey and heady with the prideful glories of the imagination.

There are the nights alone, nights with no one to cuddle except my cat, nothing to hug except the pillow, no one to talk to except the jeering silence of the walls. I tell myself that silence, as cold as it may be, is not as painful as the angry yells and furious recriminations of my parents' time.

But that, it seems, is not enough. So I continue the slow journey through loneliness.

S-youth, Sept. 22, 1997.