Melankelly and the Infinite Sadness

There's this old TV show called Alice that I used to watch with my mom when I was super young. For those of you who don't know it--and that would probably be anybody under 35--it's about a widow named Alice who moves to Phoenix with her son to start a new life and ends up working at Mel's Diner with a total dingbat named Vera and an older woman named Flo who can't stop telling people to kiss her grits (even if you don't know the show, you must at least know that line. I mean, come on).

Anyway, the TV show really has nothing to do with this post. The lyrics to its theme song do. And they go like this:

I used to be sad, I used to be shy
Funniest thing, the saddest part is I never knew why...
Kickin' myself for nothin' was my favorite sport.
I had to take off, start enjoyin' 'cause life's too short.

There's a new girl in town, 'cause I'm feelin good.
Get a smile, get a song, for the neighborhood.
Things are great when you stand on your own two feet,
and this girl's here to say with some luck and love,
life's gonna be so sweeeeeeeeeet!

Well, for the past few weeks, I've felt like that song, especially the second verse. I've had this omnipresent feeling of excitement and unboundedness, as if there's nothing I won't be able to achieve now that my life is mine. But since Friday, that feeling has been dissipating, and it's been dissipating fast. In its place is a whole lot of empty, the opposite of fulfillment, and about twenty-two gazillion gallons of sadness.

I'm not sure what happened--okay, maybe I am, but maybe I'm not in the mood to write about it (ironic since I'm writing a blog right now, huh?)--but it doesn't really matter. All that's just a story anyway; what really matters is how I feel, and how I feel right now at this very moment is like poo. I feel like nothing is real. I feel like all of my relationships, whether with males or females, platonic or not, revolve around technology rather than true human interaction, and therefore, don't really mean a whole lot in the tangible world. I feel like other than my kids and my sister, I don't really have anybody else, and I feel like for a woman who's been on this earth for thirty-seven years, that's an awfully sad thing to say.

Before I offend anybody, I have to acknowledge that I have plenty of Facebook friends and a few people I text back and forth with; there have also been several people who have offered to listen to me if I need to talk, and I appreciate them all, and I know that in their own way, in a newfangled twenty-first century kind of way, they're really friends, but that's new school, and I'm not. I'm of the school of the old. I need real-live interaction with real-live human beings. I need to inhale the scent of someone's shampoo or perfume or fabric softener, to sit across from or next to people in a bar or restaurant and see them smile about something I said or hear them laugh at the ridiculous things we see people do. I need to accidentally bump into somebody while we're sitting down, take a french fry off of somebody's plate, or sit close to somebody while we watch a scary movie. I need to see that somebody real is right there in front of me, and I don't.

What I see is no one.
And what I feel is

alone.