Sometimes it might feel as if you’ve been replaced with a stranger, because you exist only to yourself and this could be a lie.

Sometimes it may feel as if you are the only person in the world, and the coming of night will be a dive into a special kind of panic.

At times you may know yourself a void, offering only emptiness, and others you may know yourself the hollow of a tree, and these two will be different.

There will be occasions you touch the walls of your home to remind yourself you’re really there, and others when you hate them for the things they fence away from you.

After a time maybe you’ll become reluctant friends with loneliness. Maybe you talk about it with people sometimes. You nurse this specific ache to you, and know it as a type of company.

Here is some advice, from one who has been so lonely she could taste it, so lonely it was a like a garment she wore around her even when she wasn’t alone:

When your chest is full of thorns, take your own hand. You have been there since the beginning.

When you wonder if your voice might die, or your heart dissolve, or your arms fall off for lack of loving; laugh, sing, shout your alive-ness into the air and the dark. Wiggle and jump and dance my love.

And if all this can’t work, and you still are a silent, aching, lost thing with no one to look at you with kindness, know this: I am there, I sit in your chest with you, I withdraw from the dark with you, I wonder if you’ll ever be heard again with you. Though this is a terrible cliché, and though it will piss you off with how incorrect it feels, you aren’t really alone.

When you feel the horizon stretch away and your presence seems an unknown dot in a sea of foreign origins, look out your window. See, the trees move and the birds shout out their life regardless of your being an island. The large face of the moon and his armada of various bright stars sit just above and to your right. He is waltzing through the sky as a series of circles, and some parts of him are often unseen by humans too.