| You know that feeling you get when you're in a room full of people you don't know and have no one to talk to? Have you ever thought about how many other people in the room are feeling the same way that you do at that moment? There's probably a lot more than you think.
Lots of people go through each day alone. Some haven't found anyone truly like them with whom to share life and despair at ever finding them. Others have found their match, but are seperated by distance and/or circumstances. Still others have loved and lost and are frozen in that moment, trying to move on, but are unable to.
People go through each day alone. It's like that line from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho: We're all caught in our own private traps. Except no one talks about it. No one wants to be the one to reach out and take the risk of rejection. Only extraordinary situations allow for people to truly open up to each other.
One of the reasons I'm happy I'm a film major is what happened earlier this morning. We all have to screen our short films in front of the 17-person class. Today, all of the films screened happened to be about love and loneliness: love was left unrequited in all but the first shown, in which love saved the lead character. Throughout the semester, others of us (myself included) have touched on this deeply felt, but undiscussed emotion. But today, the setting was right so that we were able to openly say, "Yes, because of (a variety of reasons), we are alone." Only a couple of people were in happy, healthy relationships that weren't long distance and didn't require pining. The professor didn't quite get it at first - he thought that we were lacking social lives. But as the last filmmaker to screen today started to say (and I finished, one of the most amazing events of the morning; being able to finish this guy's thought - his earlier films had nothing to do with anything and it seems like this was why): None of these relationships mean anything if it's not the right person.
The lonely experience it by themselves, yet since we're all experiencing it alone at the same time, we're really all going through it together. | 
