Lonliness

I don't know that you can, in the strictest sense of the feeling, say that the sense of isolation and disconnectedness that I feel, on a nearly constant basis, is "loneliness". It's simply a recognition that I don't feel very well connected to my fellow man. I don't feel like there's anyone out there that truly gets or understands me. Hell, I'm not sure that even I do, fully, I'm just the closest to someone who does.

When my dad first died, the most salient thought was "the one person with whom I could actually really talk and who 'got me' has died". That was a lonely, empty feeling. That said, in the months since he's died, and, in particular, this past father's day weekend, it struck me that that initial feeling wasn't quite accurate. It wasn't so much that my dad 'got me' as much as he was of a similar enough mental makeup that he was closer to getting me than anyone else I've know. I've realized that he probably didn't really get me, he just came close. The source of this realization being that, much as we were similar, I didn't really know my dad.

While I've never had a sense of having a place to call "home", my dad apparently felt that Mahanoy City, PA was his "home." I'm not certin, however, that even that's quite accurate. If my dad truly was of a similar mental outlook to me, then no place was really home because there was no one, anywhere, who really knew him. Mahanoy City was just some place he could hang his head on as an idea of "home".