Number Two

The loneliness takes hold at the instant of birth.  We have bathed in the River Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness.  And all we know is that something is wrong; we are lost, unreachable.  We hunger to merge and our bodies prevent us.  We long to feel part of "the whole." Yet we can't hear the chords of a song that surrounds us.

The loneliness is so loud it drives us to the silence of each other's arms.  Pressing.  Full of the effort to speak, to know, to enter.  The loneliness is so loud that all we can hear is our own heartbeat, the mortality of empty space.

Everything we do requires it -- the exile with no memory of what home is, the faces we don't recognize, the path that leads nowhere except death.  Everything we learn demands this isolation -- the confines of bone and flesh, a life in the outposts where our greatest need seems so far away.