What alone feels like

Y’know what being alone in a big world full of people feels like? It’s like you’re suffocating in a vast ocean, screaming underwater, and nobody is coming to pull you out of it. Whether you struggle or not, it only drains your energy. It’s like you’re hidden in that big ocean, and all you want is to be found.
It feels like you’re an insect released into a world so full of life, but you’re not part of any of it. It’s like you’re crying, crawling, and screaming so hard your throat hurts, waiting for something you don’t even know how to name. Some days, It feels like having your head under a rock in an abandoned, crumbling building in a country lost to war, with a stray dead dog lying next to you. It’s like being a deadly spirit in a place where there is no life at all. Other times, It’s like lying among the Spartans at Thermopylae, telling yourself you did it; that you came all this way for a reason, even though you’re buried alive, and nothing turned out the way you wished, you're here for some goddamn reason.
It’s like waking up on a morgue tray, and trying to shake everyone awake. And then, all you want is to sleep like them so you won’t be so alone.
Alone is a hunger of all kinds; in your body, your mind, and your heart.

Alone is standing before a crowd that cheers for your growth, while no one sees the guilt of the sins and the tears you shed the night before you stepped on the stage. Alone is people clapping for a beautiful words you’ve written, though no one knows the bravery it took to be this gentle, the demons you’ve fought at night, and the battles you’ve waged in your mind.
Alone feels like wanting to call that high school friend you once thought was your safe place, but not being able to because she’s changed. Alone feels like picking up your phone a thousand times a day, scrolling through all your contacts, but not believing enough in anyone to call them. Alone feels like wanting to be safe in your mother’s arms but feeling like she’s mocking your vulnerability, and wanting to run as far away as possible from that mocking bird that birthed you

Alone feels like wandering the streets with nowhere to go. It feels like wanting to be held so tightly, yet hating everyone and everything that comes near you.
Alone feels like wanting to save a life you can live with, where there is no life at all. It’s like waiting for a dry, dead tree to turn green just for your own sake. Alone is a hell you somehow find comfort in, because there is no way to be taken out of it. Alone is where most of life happens, but nobody is there in your sight.
That’s what being alone feels like. It’s indescribable somehow, and we try to deceive ourselves by turning all of this into art. Alone is an art. Alone is being able to write when you can’t escape the walls that are holding you hostage. indescribable but playable in our words.

We fail to get rid of it, so we try to paint it in colors; blue ones, sad but those colors we like to see. I like blue, so I painted it blue. We dress it in metaphor. We sing to confront the restless voices in our minds that refuse to leave us be. We sing it beautifully; like the Greek refugees’ urban blues, full of exile and heartbreak but so captivating. Like the Turkish Müslüm Gürses, like the Irish folk singers who carry centuries of loss and love in their melodies.

And we paint it in strokes like Van Gogh’s swirling blues, with a grief that refuses to die; like Edvard Munch, we scream colors into the void; like Caravaggio, we imitate the shadows where light and darkness clash.
Alone is where we create art from silence and nothingness; indescribable but playable in our words. It’s where we sing, paint, and write our way out of drowning, even if no one comes to save us.