From the words that we listed a few days ago when talking about the meanings of travelling, I chose ‘lonely’, and I took the definition which is: an empty house among other houses that are full of people.

The first time I read this definition, I was taken aback. I believe that it involves an essence of poetry. (Although Valery says that beauty cannot be summarized) I must say that I notice that the feeling of loneliness delivered in this definition almost hurts the soul. It indicates absence, the interaction with nothing, and a disengagement from existence. By illustrating loneliness through an object (home), it devalues the subject of loneliness (home, or the self) to correspond to the feelings of the lonely individual and this directly touches the reader. The definition also attracts images, for example, when I read it I imagined that I was in a dark house looted by nothingness, and in this house, the only sound was the echoes of the laughter of distant people.

I remember standing in front of the bulletin board on which this definition was written, traversing through the feeling that it gives. I thought again and again and interacted with the metaphor while it interacted with me.

I want to thank the person who wrote this definition. Like Christopher Hitchens starts to his book ‘Letters to A Young Contrarian’, I say ‘my dear x’ to the owner of this definition and share these sentences and expressions that I wrote after what the definition made me imagine. They grow like a tree:

loneliness
nowhere
nothingness
presence of a pain in the absence
the distant laughter of ghosts
an elegant sorrow
the silence of the rose
the shadow of a life
walls with no face
objects without identity
subconscious of death
rooms without unity
a river one extinct
a black mountain: namelessness, emptiness, infertility

In a nutshell, the definition stimulated in me a zeal to produce metaphors and contemplate different aspects and possibilities of loneliness. Through this, I interacted with the definition of another person and recreated feelings and perspectives. It was a unique experience.