Lonely is the word that keeps echoing around in my big head, and I think it's pretty accurate. I feel lonely. I have good friends, and a good life, and a busy job full of talking to people about work things and also the nasty stuff guys get up to in their bathroom. I e-mail people and people e-mail me and I read message boards, which are very busy and full of life, and I feel lonely and disconnected and like I should be out wandering all alone on a misty moor, wailing wailing wailing.

There are people to call, and people to hang out with, but those people always seem busy, and calling always seems hard, and also intrusive and rude and my problems are very boring, and anyway, I am in no shape to talk to anyone. I am no fun. I am extremely dull when I am sad. I want to go out, and talk to people and attend Events and have Fun, but I also want to lie on the couch and watch Grey's Anatomy under a blanket with a cat on me. Things are very hard, when you are me.

I know exactly what it is. A romantic relationship is not the end-all, be-all of a life, but this sudden lack of one feels like it is looming very large and blocking everything else. Four years in one, four minutes in another, both are over for very different (and disturbingly similar) reasons, and I am left sitting here wondering what it was I did and can I move to Mexico, please? Mexico sounds nice. The bottom of a well sounds nice. Maybe the bottom of a well in Mexico.

I am not prone to being a lonely person, which is one of the reasons this is so difficult to shake off. I am an introvert, and from all my scientific research, I can tell you confidently that an introvert derives energy from his or her internal world of emotions and ideas. Or something like that. Thank you, Dr. Internet. Thank you further, Myers Briggs, for letting me know that my letters go INFP, and bless you, Keirsey Temperament Sorter, for alerting me that I'm an Artisan. Cosmo, however, tells me I'm Boy Crazy, and also a Spontaneous Sista, because whether I'm hopping a plane or a guy I just met, I make fast decisions and follow my impulses in pursuit of whirlwind adventures. But I'm just going to go with "introvert" as it is a short word and is the kind of English I understand and does not hurt me.

If it were up to me, I'd be an energy vampire. I would suck energy from the sky and the trees and the ground and passing cars and small kittens and cheese sandwiches. I would have a never-ending supply of energy, and I would use my power for Good And Not Evil, for I would give large chunks of it away free on street corners. I would. But I can't, because I have so little of it to spare, especially now when everything sucks (except me). (Energy, I meant, you pervert. Hot-cha-cha-cha.)

So I like to be alone, and I need to be alone, and I hate being alone right now, right at this second where there is nothing more in the world I want to be than alone. I also dislike irony. Is that irony? I also dislike not knowing exactly what irony is. If I weren't so lonely and alone, I'd totally ask someone. I bet that's irony too! It just doesn't get any funnier. In every sense of the sentence.