For as much as we want to believe it, communities will not save us. Try as we might to reach out for compassion, romance and truth from another hand - we are still only a reaching hand, in the end.
In the end, we go through the hardest moments of this life when we are alone.
This sad, sad life.
We look back constantly, in a state of childlike wonder and amazement. We think 'it can never be like this again' and we mourn those July days of Westport ice cream, grassy and dandelion-ridden fields, flowered shirts and brown acoustic guitars.
But like the band says the words, "we are fated to pretend".
We grow up and we get good at faking it. We go through the motions and live a wooden life of puppeteered moves and calculated decisions. Our finances don't bring excitement - they bring us larger concern and worry. And for a while, we think we can get out of the funk.
We bring a child into it. We conceive a version of our selves back into this sick, demented world.
We become intertwined with the wires and broadband data of the internet and we treat it like a real, living, breathing friend. We embrace it. It rarely lets us down and we use it for all that we need. It is there to serve us.
It's cheap. It's fake. It's instant.
I have 8 Bubble Witch Saga requests on Facebook. I don't even know what the fuck a Bubble Witch is - let alone, how she rides on a broom if she's made of fucking soap and water.
Seriously. Horse shit.
We create false worlds of digitally pixelated farms and we take tiny resources of mouse-clicking stock for an LED-grown harvest. We live in the warm light of our laptop screen. We dwell there. We bathe in its comfortably incandescent glow.
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world.
Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.
Like the makings of an early spring morning, we see the condensation on the inside of our lives, and we pull the covers of complacency up higher. They engulf our hearts and make wombs out of our ambition.
If you really hear Jesus talking to you, then get out of those rotted, board and batten pews and get out into the street that scares you the most. Stand among the needles and the HIV and the dirt. Don't sit around in your turtlenecks and knits, inside a comfortable building with a large window and year-round AC, and speak a language that no outsider can understand.
If you really want to be like Jesus, drop it all and do it. Be prepared to be raped by the world - just like he was.
Sure - you can wish for friendship, understanding and acceptance from all facets of your social streamline, but in the end, you are a consumer - awaiting a plastic product.
As sure as the moist cookie crumbles in my mouth, and takes me back to summer nights of my youth, licking the dessert off the roof of my mouth, I am there. Tasting it. Letting the sugars soak into my being. Feeling the sun like a warm ray of condolence from the heavens. The sun finally lowers into a bath of warm gamma-rays from the truth of the sun.
But one day, we will get it right. We truly will.
If we embrace it - if we let the slow, cold dark in with open arms, we just might make it through the night and see a brighter day. A brighter day that only lightens for your eyes and no one else's. We all need to hit that moment where the straw breaks the camel's back - for at our boiling point, we see other revelatory things illuminated that were dark before.
And we will take joy, and one day, we shall know that there really is no 'we' - there is only I.
And I'll be alright with it.
