My daily journal.

I have always been fascinated with human beings.

Ever since I was a child, I always loved hearing their stories, their memories, their problems, their secrets, the things they feel deeply about. I can sit for hours and hours just talking to different people. Adults, kids, old people, women, men, top, bottom, addicts, fanatics, gays, lesbians, criminals, farmers, street vendors, star gazers, womanizers, corrupt politicians, prostitutes, dreamers, how I love talking to them all. I once made it a goal to talk to at least one stranger a day. I would always look at them with my eyes filled with so much wonder, jotting down on my notebook some random lesson or quote they managed to say that I do find remarkable.

I adore and collect people with the same sagacity that I adore and collect my favorite books, films, or music. I would often find myself searching for an empty table on a crowded place, silently hoping some random stranger would sit there, so I could strike a conversation (I always do). I often do this during trips from or to Tablas, trying to collect as much human wisdom as much as I could during the boat trip.

But to be honest...there are times when I would wish that someone would also be fascinated with me in the same way I am with them.

There are days that I wish someone would invite me over coffee or perhaps breakfast not because they want to tell me something, or need something from me, but rather because they want to drink my thoughts and stories. There are times I want someone to listen to me for a change. For someone to also look at me with wonder and recognize that I too have a soul. Someone who would ask me why I thought or felt that. Someone who would tell me if they could borrow my notebooks over night just so they could have a better understanding of who I am. Sometimes I have this longing to be dug deep, to be psychoanalyzed, to be a subject of someone's sheer curiousity. I long to be understood. Not in a superficial social media way.. But deeply.. Really deeply.. Not to be recognized, but to be appreciated and cherished. There are also days that I want to hear who I am from the perspective of others. Oh how I crave for someone brave enough to read my soul.

But I have always been ashamed of this longing. I thought I was being self-centered, narcissistic even... I thought it was a sin to have this desire to be understood.

This is where my impulsive addiction to confess to strangers began. When I was nineteen, I once woke up in the middle of the night, so desperate to satisfy this longing , that I found myself grabbing a jacket, bolted outside, without any particular plan but with the resolve to talk to the very first stranger I meet, and to him or her confess my entire being. I was unsuccessful that night. But I never got rid of the habit. I would continue sneaking out in the middle of the night, desperate, like a hunter searching for a prey.. And then one day, I discovered my power over the opposite sex. This longing to be understood got mixed up with my most animalistic desires. And then there I was, at age nineteen, jumping from one stranger's bed to another, flesh after flesh, stranger after stranger, mask after mask, with the naive belief that naked bodies would somehow lead to naked souls. But although these nights ( or afternoons) would provide their own temporary reliefs and comforts, the longing remained.

The shame persisted. That is the time I resorted to writing to cope.I wrote and wrote. Sometimes in riddles. Sometimes completely exposing my bare truths. But no matter how I scattered around clues and pieces of myself, no matter how I made my soul public, nobody really understood. Some tried, sincerely or otherwise. But the longing remains.

I think Bukowski was the one who said something about how you would be surprised how lonely people in this world could be. And how much damage we could do to each other when we are lonely. When we are not understood. But I believe there is hope. Every now and then, I will encounter special people, and in them I would find glimmers of light and warmth. I trust that we could all help each other and still make this world less lonely than how we first found it. I sincerely do.

Thank you for reading. <3