The glass is too far away from my bed, but I am thirsty.

I am not thirsty, I am afraid, and I want to drown it in something, to feel something.

An animal lives inside me; the human in me is almost dead. It claws me open from the inside, spits into the wounds, and I writhe in rhythm with the pain.

I ask myself many things—truly many things; I think this is what loneliness does to me.

I am tired of pretending false optimism or false joy in order to protect those around me. I feel like shit—really, extremely like shit. I fight. I fight all the time, and my weapon is blunt and broken.

Sometimes I imagine myself as some kind of hero who has to go on a journey to repair his weapon. You know, even cool heroes eventually have their swords break. Or Beowulf: an old king who fights a much stronger dragon, only to find his own death in victory.

But I am neither Beowulf nor Achilles, and certainly not Odysseus.

I am alone and defenseless. I am fragile and breakable. I am lost and half dead.

I read the same book three times because I love it so much, when Camus says:

“Why should I care about his god, the lives, the destinies we choose when one unique destiny has chosen me, and along with me millions and millions of privileged others who, like him, called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he understand, could he really not understand? Everyone was privileged.”

And I ask myself what it is in this world that holds the secret of togetherness.

The people I was once so close to are often nothing more than a pure dream in the mind of memory. I had to strip myself naked, leave the garments of privilege behind in purgatory, surrender my body to revelation—and what remains is nothing but a reduction to the most essential element of our capitalist, misogynistic society: the concept of loneliness.

I no longer fit, and what does not fit gets discarded. Others should take care of it, others should fix it, others should understand me.

But back to Camus:

We truly are all privileged. We all bathe daily in the privilege of meaninglessness and hide in castles of faith, universal morality, or good manners. The privilege of filling our lives with meaninglessness and mistaking it for meaning is the virus of capital.

Only very few—and usually painfully, directly—become aware of the potential and the unfolding that lie in the withdrawal of higher morality. Yes, stripped of the capitalist idea, of the privilege of belonging and being part of a self- satisfied elite, the true privilege reveals itself: that of the absolute unfolding of meaninglessness through the experience of groundlessness.