I think this is my punishment. This pulsing, breathing pain that waits beneath my skin, coiled and poised, ready to strike. It is here within me to remind me, unfailingly -unerringly - of each and every one of my constant failures to thrive. To survive.

Here I sit, alone. Alone and lone, one girl, alone. Away from the rest; why should I ever know what it’s like to be a part of the great whole?

It is obviously my fate to languish in an exiled existence, isolated in a frigid cage beyond the redemption of a brilliant sun. Here I sit, enclosed by the glacial stillness, and I wonder how long I can exist as this. The ice queen. My mind, though I wish it were, is not a tundra, but I live in one, alone.

Why do I have to continue on, struggling, struggling, working, kicking, fighting, clawing my way to the sweet air of the surface that inflates my lungs with quick jerking gasps? Why do I have to keep lunging towards the finish of yet another gloomy day, filled with light and laughter and hope and sunlight and grass and moon and twinkling stars but little love? I need love - what human being with a beating heart and a expanding set of lungs does not? Yet I have never felt the love of the romantic kind. The love that spawns the flowery poems of soft downy meadows and rushing streams.

I have only felt the love of a father’s embrace, a mother’s touch, a brother’s warmth. All of these encompass me, at times, worship and renew me, but, again, I reach the precipice where even these alone cannot sustain me, and I withdraw, once more, to the fortress of my youth.

So often my lips tingle, fraught with an aching longing to be touched, caressed in the way that lips do. That other lips do - for my lips have never felt that fleeting butterfly’s wing against them. Nor have they felt the lion’s roar against them, nor the lover’s tear. They have felt only my words, the lingering battlements of my youth. They have not felt love. Now, I sit alone, and doubt that they will ever feel love.

So here I sit. Alone and lone, a lone girl in this world, ungraced by grace, untouched by touch. I miss it so much, for something I have never felt, have never known. I am unknown by the world of love. Unknown and alone.