“Perhaps you share your life with someone: a space, a bed, habits that are part of your routine, gestures that mark the passing of the days. Perhaps you live with voices that call your name, with presences that surround you, with bonds that, through repetition, seem unbreakable. Perhaps you laugh with others, respond to messages, fulfill what is expected of you. And yet—and perhaps precisely because of this—you live alone. Not because you lack relationships, but because there is a radical impossibility for someone else to inhabit your being. Your uniqueness does not allow for occupation. That internal, irreducible space cannot be transferred or shared.
No one perceives the world from your point of view. No one experiences your exhaustion with your exact weight. No one thinks your thoughts with your cadence, your way of falling silent, your way of stopping. No one feels your heart and its emotions. You can live with someone for decades without ever knowing what dreams wake them up, what silences stop them in their tracks. You can love someone intensely and yet never reach the exact core where their pain takes shape. This is not a lack of affection, but a structure. Loneliness is not a dysfunction of the human condition: it is its core. We are not what we show. Nor are we what we express. We are that which resists all translation.
And yet we insist on denying the obvious. We equate closeness with understanding. We project onto others the fantasy that they are our shelter, our reflection, our company, our protection, our guarantee. We expect those who love us to intuit our needs, decipher our absences, interpret our silences, feel our feelings. We behave as if loving meant accessing a higher form of knowledge. But no such faculty exists.
What we call love is often a dance between two solitudes that, at their best, learn not to invade each other. Sometimes they meet, and other times they simply coincide. Accepting that we are strangers is not the same as giving up.
It is a form of clarity. Abandoning the illusion of being understood means giving up a childish expectation: that of being saved. No one is coming. And that realization is not tragic… it is liberating. As long as you wait for someone else to fill your voids, you will continue to deny that those voids are yours. That the loneliness that constitutes you is not a mistake: it is your true form… your most real outline.
You have tried to silence it. You have resorted to noise, acceleration, hedonism, compulsive attachments. Not out of desire, but out of fear. Not out of openness, but out of evasion. But that loneliness you call a burden is not a condemnation, it is a certainty. It is the beginning of every search that aspires not to lie to itself. Only when you stop running away from yourself can the true encounter begin.
We are inevitably strangers. It is not a matter of suppressing that distance, nor of forcing a union that denies it. It is about inhabiting the separation, recognizing it without drama. Offering it to the other without asking them to eliminate it. It is unreasonable to expect to be rescued from our loneliness. No one can do that, not even for themselves.
When this truth is no longer resisted, its texture changes. What once seemed like a burden becomes an opening.”
Prabhuji
