I am not close enough to anyone to turn to them when I am alone. There is no one whose shoulder I trust enough to lean on, let alone to cry upon. I have friends; more than a few but certainly not many. But I worry that perhaps all this time I have been keeping myself, somehow, at a distance. My closest friends are geographically the farthest from me, and can offer me nor company nor comfort in my darkest of hours. Once, I had a best friend. We spoke of everything, shared ourselves with each other in many ways. Still, there were limits to our friendship. Still, we drifted apart. She cried on my shoulder once. I never felt comfortable enough to do the same. Ince I resigned myself to crying on the shoulder of a friend. But thefriend in question was having a bad enough time that when he heard me crying, he had to go away. I couldn't talk to him nor turn to him, I could not bear to be alone in such agony. And so I wept. And so I wrote. And so I sang. But today, in my present life, I do not sing nor write nor even weep. I numb myself to feelings with self-talk, with curse words and cigarettes, with drugs I don't have and will not get. I try to work. I try to be functional in my social role. Fit into the position that employers put me into. But I am not that puzzle piece. My place fills a void of kindness in someone's heart, and contains a void of confidence and safety that need to be filled. There is one, and only one person who I feel close enough to at this point in my life to cry on. I love him, and he loves me, and we put up with every crazy thing that the other does. But he is thousands of miles away. Our relationship takes every bit of time and money that we can muster, takes every bit of attention and care that we can nourish it with. And suddenly I look around, in my time of crisis, to find that there is no one and nowhere for me to feel safe. I have no shoulder to cry on. I can offer one to afriend, or all friends, or even a stranger. but for me, I do not know where to turn. Everything in my life, including my friendships, have goneuntended. Sometimes I have sprayed poison instead of fertiliser upon my garden of friends. Sometimes I have stepped on and squashed a new bud before it could even start to form. But I never thought that whatever closeness I might have built up to any other human being could be so easily lost, or that whatever feeling I had that made me think of them as friends would disappear. I never thought I would feel this alone. There are more negative consequences than help in any situation my mind can devise. And so, I wander gloomily back into this diary, my dark and private journal, my dead end. I can take solace here, alone, knowing that I am alone. And now the reason that I do not feel kinship isn't because it simply isn't there, or because I scare them away with my sorrows... but because I do not reach out to them, because of my own choice. On top of all of these feelings, rejection is one thing I could not handle.