Image of Lonliness

He sat hunched over the desk, his elbows planted firmly beneath the yellow glow of a craning desk lamp. In his right hand applying gracefully the soft led of a colored pencil, he traced the contour of an image conceived; a dark and solitary tree drawn over a streaked and open sky. Pulling his body up further onto the desk and focusing his eyes on the tip of the pencil, he carved large muscular branches stark and cold against the sunset colors. They buckled and contorted, winding outwards, forking off into smaller tributaries, flowing with incredible slowness; arthritic streams between a bright and variegated sky. Lifting the pencil from the page from dullness, he sharpened it with a few swift stokes of his pocket knife and reapplied the fine tip to the page reaching the branches to their terminal width, and bringing the tree to its final size. Sitting up now as if waking from a trance, he noticed that it was small and wiry, strikingly distinct from the expansive and glowing sunset. Beyond the branches shifting planes of colors blurred and drifted into one another, fading gradually into the deeper blue atmosphere forsaken by the retreating sun. A startling image, for it captured rather well, for him, the sense of abject separateness he had been ignoring for most his life. The sense that all things live and die alone. The damning words of Aldous Huxley still ringing in his head from a year ago; something about "lovers attempting to fuse their souls in one final embrace, but in vain." And, while this desolate feeling came over him, its opposite was inspired in return... Cold desperation gave way to the vigorous rushing of a small hurricane swirling about in his chest gaining strength with the prospect, the promise of love for a girl.