Day 14

Lost in a lonely melancholy early this morning, I tried to find the edges of that emotion, to name the boundaries of that state. I wanted—suddenly—to describe exactly what loneliness feels like. Everyone talks about feeling lonely but so rarely is the crush of it actually detailed. I wrote down that it felt like entering a room no one had walked through for a long time, the dust thick on the floor, the air stale. It feels like a vice grip on my sternum or like sand filling up the spaces in my body, constricting my breath. But none of that felt good enough or encompassed all of it.

So I turned to the great poets. If anyone’s ever captured the ephemeral nature of any emotion, it was a poet. I remembered Sonnet 29, from Shakespeare:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below and I’ll check out your work!