My Internal Struggle

Oh No! It’s nighttime again, 3 am and the sun has gone down hours ago, beginning my chronic nightmare. The old-fashioned wind-up pendulum clock on my bedroom wall tics away the seconds; tic, tic, tic, tic, as the dizzying swinging of the round disc at the end of the silver chain breaks the silence of the quiet night, but it will be hours yet before sunrise brings a tiny bit of relief to my ever present, self-imposed torture. I’m awake now; the subconscious world of my sleeping dreams has morphed into the conscious world of my wide awake thoughts. Both torture me to death. Yet it wasn’t always that way.

I was born seventy years ago, the youngest of three sons to a lower middle class working family. I grew up in a city environment and had a normal childhood with the pleasures of making friends on the block and in my schools. The relationship with my older brothers and me was a good one. We often played together and when they grew old enough to become more interested in girls, they still never abandoned me. When I grew to that stage of development, as hormones began to rage, and my attention turned to girls, both physically and emotionally, my brothers provided much advice and guidance. They helped me to avoid common missteps and the result was an active and enjoyable social life through my teens and beyond. While both my brothers eventually married and raised families of their own, I never followed that path. I engaged in a few serious relationships over my life and a few heartbreaks too. Nothing more than normal for a bachelor’s life. Today, all of that provides me with fond memories, few regrets but also loneliness. No wife to share life’s joys and sorrows, no children to leave behind as a family legacy or to rely on for old age assistance and comfort. After seven decades of life, that’s an emptiness impossible to correct.

As I grew into adulthood, I achieved a graduate level education and built a career that provided me with an upper middle income level of financial reward. I lived a comfortable life but spent freely and frivolously. Travel was always a method to meet new people and I would take week long vacations to Europe a few times a year. Sometimes I’d take along a current girlfriend, but most often, I’d go alone and meet women for some quick pleasures before returning home, never to see them again. If was fun, it was exciting, it was expensive and often risky. Sexual activity with a stranger in a foreign country can be dangerous physically, dangerous to your health and even result in imprisonment if one is not very careful to avoid girls who could be under age. Such trips to Asian countries exacerbated all those issues. On two occasions of such foreign trips, I experienced everything except imprisonment. As I indicated, it was risky and therefore, exciting. The spending offered opportunities for fun and pleasures but denied a financial future free from worry. Today, I pretty much live Social Security check to Social Security check. No pay checks to use as the more common phrase would dictate. Once again, this phase of my life left plenty of time for a playful walk down memory lane, but leaves me with some remorse.

I continued that life style through my working years. I owned a modest home in the suburbs of a major city where I would commute to work each day by car. Twice in my life, I had a female companion move in to my home and live with me for a short time. Neither relationship lasted more than a year. Between those serious relationships, there were a few casual dalliances, most lacking real emotional connections. As I grew older, I became more settled into a routine life with an almost imperceptible reduction in socialization. Even as such a gradual decline in a social life proceeded, I was able to survive in a world where I was increasingly alone. I had interests in the arts, music, and history. I engaged in a few solitary hobbies too, so all was acceptable, but gradually morphed into heavier feelings of loneliness. Trying to replace that feeling with the pleasures of being around others, I joined some groups in an effort to meet new people and make new friends. It soon became obvious that as people age, their interests change dramatically. More conversations among those around my age were focused on health issues, financial problems or family discontent as their children moved away or provide less interaction then they desired. Well, I have no children and I do not need to hear about whose prostate is acting up, or how coffee “runs right through me” and other bodily dysfunctions. Talk to your doctor, not me. I wanted stimulating conversation, mind enhancing discussions and maybe even a potential romantic development with a woman my age. I’m finding none of that; it just does not seem to exist at this stage of life or within our society. I have to look elsewhere, or give up.

Suddenly, one day, insidious old age sneaks into your life like a furtive thief in the darkness of night and it steals any attractiveness of youth as well as your vitality and physical abilities of younger years. Like the monster it is, this thief leaves you with just enough to be a constant reminder of how it once was in the seemingly not so distant past. It leaves you with your memories, your feeling of still being youthful, and most serious of all, the strength of your desires. Desires that can never again be satisfied, creating great frustration and discontent. If this old age villain leaves you with your intellect, it creates the foundation of a constant internal conflict between your emotions, desires, and your sensible knowledge of reality. Nature is a cruel aspect of life. Some wild animals chase their prey and eat them alive, while Humans raise some life forms, such as chickens, cattle and hogs, just to slaughter them for food. And nature leaves the aging Human ill equipped to handle their frailties, satisfy their desires and spend their last years in peace and comfort. Cruelty beyond concept, and so is often pushed out of the minds of members of many Human societies. Unfortunately, not out of my mind.

Each day I witness others in love, or in lust, but nonetheless, they are together enjoying the physical comfort of Human contact. I see them holding hands as they walk down the street, a quick kiss as they temporarily part company, and I envision them cuddling in bed, touching and feeling the warmth and comfort of skin on skin. A fulfillment of a basic social need of Human existence and maintenance of life itself. Without that intimate social interaction, loneliness ensues and, especially in the elderly, death soon follows. Each day, I try to avoid the scenes, but it is impossible to do so. I am tortured most days by these images taken in by my eyes and burnt on my brain’s permanent memory cells where they act to stir emotions, poke at desires that my intellect knows will never again be satisfied. It creates a constant conflict between my emotionally charged feelings and my intellectual knowledge of the normalcy of the aging process in our society. Where can I escape this torture?

Each night I experience a restless sleep, interrupted by dreams of what can never be reality for me. I wake hugging a pillow as I was dreaming of being hugged, and hugging, a woman in a loving embrace. An experience never to be enjoyed again. I awake with tears and throw the pillow across a darkened room, a lonely bedroom where I sleep by myself night after night with no hope of reprieve from this self-imposed prison of loneliness. Other nights I dream of sitting in my living room with a long ago deceased friend, enjoying some wine and telling each other our secrets and desires. Only to awake in the darkness of that ever present loneliness of despair and emptiness of a big house with no one in it.

I remain home alone, I find myself spending more and more time alone with my thoughts and my unfulfilled desires, until I realize that these desires are really needs, as basic as food and water to my continued ability to survive. If only there were a friend to confide in, a wife to share my feelings with, a child to help me cope, but there is no one to reach out and share my feelings, my thoughts or my life’s experiences. All my old friends, a few lifelong buddies with whom we shared our life’s successes, failures, feelings, desires, experiences and dreams, are gone now. There is no one left on Earth who knows me, and who I know, well enough to share what I feel today. Creating a feeling of loneliness so deep and dark that the depth of the deepest ocean would seem like bright summer sunshine in comparison.

Both suddenly, and yet slowly, my emotions take control of my body, and as I realize that I am alone, and will always be alone from now on, and the tears flow like rushing water from the heaviest thunderstorm imaginable. My intellect tells me that this is normal, ageing Humans all have these feelings, and the strong ones find how to cope and replace what they are missing with other, pleasurable activities. But my emotions are too strong, they tell me that I can never be anything but alone, forever pained by living a loveless life and the loss of old friends. Two essentials of life that cannot ever be replaced and that I can never learn to accept. The constant conflict between my emotions and my intellect is over. Emotions have won the battle and the war is ended. All that’s left now is to sit home alone and wait for the end of life itself. There is no escape, no hope; there is just nothing.