Solitude Revisited

Solitude is an interesting thing. It is quite different from loneliness. Loneliness feels like the following. “ I lean my forehead against the glass and a great heaving tide pours over me, drowns me- in the most unpremeditated ways, in the oddest of places and for the most absurd reasons, as the day is generally calm, even cheerful, that sudden tide sweeps in called loneliness.” Those words are found on the second page of a book I read recently.
Solitude is a different beast. It perpetuates loneliness because solitude naturally leads to a withdrawing from people and society at large. I seem to levitate on the peripheral set smugly in an observant mode. Everything and everyone around seems to operate wholly on another plane of existence. The motions and the sounds penetrate that realm of solitude only to accentuate the self-awareness of the solitude. Those persons who happen to notice my existence exist as onlookers from a zoo yet they are unaware that it is they who are captured in the cage, encapsulated by the grey shadow of their reality, as if innocently unaware of the status of the reality of my unreality. And it is in that paradigm that I am ruler of this world. My kingly status is secretly held within my solitude yet smoothly felt with an air of prideful passivity.
And I wander on. I turn the corner with these silent footsteps following me.