Loneliness

Out in the cold I stand
Looking on at the world sitting tight
With its people in their nice little worlds
and the friends who don't even know me.
It really makes no difference to their world where I am;
If I'm there, it keeps going
if I'm not, it goes on.
Why walk around, wondering, wondering
My mind a mass of mixed up machinery
Clashing with conflicts and unanswered questions.
I don't ask the world if it is real
It sits up there on its foundations
Secure, concrete, hard and stone and real,
But maybe I'm not real
Or, if I am, maybe I shouldn't be.
They answer, "Smile, God loves you"
but I can't smile.
I'm numbed by cold, inside and out
even the heat in the square brick buildings
would only warm my body but nothing else.
I'm alone in a world full of people
apart, shut-up inside myself
cold, unfeeling, in a cold, unfeeling world.
--Anonymous (appropriately)

I heard Ravi Zacharias quote this poem in a program on loneliness and it brought me to tears because it says, in words far more eloquent than my own, exactly how I feel.