Dark Nights — Unbearable Loneliness

I remember feeling this way back in California. The dark, dark nights when all the darkest thoughts, the most unbearable loneliness, the deepest and most wrenching craving for comforting human touch that I couldn’t have kept me awake for hours or haunted my restless dreams. 

I’m sure I had some moments like that here in Colorado, too, in the past three years that I’ve been living here, but somehow I cannot remember them as well as the dark, lonely nights in California. 

Which seems to confirm that this is, indeed, one of the roughest bouts of loneliness that I’ve been experiencing in a long time. 

Or am I just “more aware” of the loneliness and more clearly aware of what precise needs I have now? 

I need more human touch, more human touch of the friendly and comforting kind.

I am, once again, starved of human touch. 

It’s mostly circumstantial now, I think, since over the past couple years and especially over the past few months I have either been building new relationships which are inherently more touchy-feely or have been loosening up into more comforting touch with some established platonic friends. But in the past couple weeks especially the sources of comforting, friendly touch from my queer spheres of friendships have drastically diminished, or temporarily been paused, for different reasons (seasonal illness, new jobs, new relationships, fatigue, conflicting schedules…). And for many months now I haven’t had my other source of physical connection that comes from climbing with my close buddies. That has also been circumstantial (injuries, new life goals/paths with spouses and/or new careers…), but it’s real and affects me. 

The temporary loss, or decrease, of physical intimacy and/or or comforting touch from my friends and chosen families, i.e. from that safe “little bubble of mine”, added to the general hostility I’m feeling toward my community and myself as a trans person, in particular, from the “outer world” has just become almost impossible to bear in this past week. I can really feel it affecting my emotional and mental well-being. 

My battery of human touch is drained, I’m down to a dangerously-close-to-unfunctional level of loneliness: how do I replenish this battery that we need so badly as humans?