weary heart

Loneliness and disappointment are the emotions that most frequently and painfully burden my soul.

Sometimes I allow myself to hope, really hope, that a relationship will work out. But that hope comes at such a price. Such hope, truly felt, always results in sorrow. And time after time, unfulfilled hope deepens a unreturned text or call or failed relationships into a much more potent rejection and disappointment.

And yet I feel called upon, almost required, to hope. To not give up. To trust. To wait. To believe. Logically that is the only option left to one who desires to one day be truly happy and loved. But, oh, what a toll such a cycle of hope and disappointment demands from my heart.

As a single woman, I can be okay with supporting myself, establishing my own life, and living my own plan B. I can feel that plan includes a life of meaning and potential. But I can never, in my singleness, escape the loneliness, the ache from the deepest corners of my heart, that comes as I fall asleep by myself each night.

"And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness" Paulo Coehlo

At times, this search for that right “one” feels like small form of torture. And I wonder why I allow myself to invest my weary heart in guy after guy after guy.... strangers, really, who for varied periods of time somehow appear as if they might actually be worth all the hoping... until days or week or months later it becomes all too apparent that they aren't.

You'd think I would learn. But those moments, those small moments where I don't feel alone... the goodnight hug, the long conversation, the quiet companionship of a few brief hours... string me along from friday night to friday night still hoping.