Feature Issue on Loneliness and People with Intellectual, Developmental, and Other Disabilities

Minister of Loneliness

By Anna McFarland

If I was made the minister of loneliness I would play some music and talk to them about their hobbies and their favorite type of music. Listening to them. Giving them advice or reassurance, talking about art.

She Was Lonely

By Dee Kilgore

Once upon a time there was a lonely girl who lived in a lonely house made of lonely bricks that held in heat and warded out the cold. The lonely girl did not want to leave her lonely house and venture out into the world because the world had tricked her before, neglected her after the assault on her body, her mind, her spirit, her soul. The lonely girl took hot showers all day, scrubbing herself not clean enough in her mind. So she scrubbed and scrubbed, and then made herself scalding hot coffee to burn the taste out of her mouth.

The lonely girl read books when she wasn’t in the shower, books about love and desire knowing that that was not what had happened to her. So she got back in the shower and scrubbed some more, then dressed in her baggy jeans and an over-sized sweater, anything to make herself look undesirable. As if looks had anything to do with it when she had been the victim of a power play, caught between his inability to perform to his father’s expectations and acquiesce to his mother’s love. So he struck out at the lonely girl, rendering her as helpless as he always felt himself. They were two lonely people on the wrong collision path, the destinies now irrevocably tied together in knots of pain.