Lonely Home

I’m sitting in this house, looking for someone to talk to. Funny how such a boisterous house – TV switched on all day long, play station 2 football games in the sitting room, CDs blasting in my room, all the while everybody’s on their phones – yet I sit and feel deserted and alone. I try to talk to her, I actually think we’re making progress (in the me: speaking, her: listening department), but then I realize there’s a blank look in her face, she has no idea what I just said. She lives in her own world and it’s very hard to get her back here, away from her contemplations and problems. Now even when she is listening I suspect that she isn’t, and I can never be sure. I ask her to repeat what I just told her, but I know she's just repeating the last thing she heard. I can’t really relate or truly connect to friends from uni because although we live in the same country, we’re from different worlds. And I do tend to become a little shallow when around them ;) which is not the point of trying to talk to a person. I really hope I end up marrying someone who knows so much about the world, so much that I don’t know, that I would be awed every time he opened his mouth. I want to talk to someone I can learn from, even if they know little more than I know. Just someone who has been around and knows what they're talking about. Intelligent people, or just people who know more than I do (while making me feel really stupid) fascinate and completely mesmerize me. There is nothing more captivating to me than a person who has traveled and knows a lot about other people...other lives, completely different than ours.
I can squeeze in a few conversations with the other lady, but there’s hardly much I can talk about with an 80-plus year-old lady, and my grasp of Swahili isn’t that amazing so we usually end up arguing about what we ‘meant’ to say. That leaves me with him, but in the last few years we have grown apart and he is in his own world. He has his own problems, his own issues; his own fights…his own life. Plus he does tend to get a bit sarcastic, a lot of the times mocking, and very insensitive so I feel like instead of making the effort to talk to him, I avoid making conversation. He is a genius, a charmer, can win over a crowd within seconds, and is exactly the kind of guy I want to learn from, but he only gives you real information on general issues when he is making fun of your lack of knowledge, not just so you can know. He is still the bearer of all my secrets, it’s just difficult to talk to him because he picks on every word, and kind of misses the point of what I’m trying to tell him just because of the words I choose to use. 90% of the time they are all out and occupied with their own lives, and I feel abandoned. I don’t blame them, it’s just that I feel like when I am at home I have to beg for attention, and I crave anyone who gives me any attention at all. But they’re so busy wrapped up in their own worlds they don’t realize that time is passing so quickly, things are changing as the seconds tick by, every split-second of our time together is precious and valuable, and yet we seem to try to keep ourselves busy, and our lives full of hectic activity, until we become unavailable to those who need us.
The part that hurts is, I have 2 years left before I graduate, and get married, and I will be out of their lives forever. 2 years seems too little for us to catch up on years worth of feeling neglected. Yes they can say that we will still meet, we will still be family, we will make time to spend with each other: if you're practical you'll know that soon I will have my own family, my own job, my own problems, my own life. And we will never get this back again. I'm not saying drop everything so you can come talk with me. I'm saying, at least once a day, we should have one real conversation about things that are hurting us/making us happy/troubling us. But even that gets the standard: "Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening, I have a lot of my mind..." followed by a listing of all the problems that make me feel guilty for even attempting to talk about anything that is upsetting me. One day we'll wake up, realized that all those years have passed in a flash, and say: where has it all gone?
Sitting at home, in my own home, is the loneliest I can ever be, and attention-seeking as I am, I do my best to get out of here and spend time with my ever-so-loving and totally company-keeping cousins, and get out of the house where everything else is priority over spending time with family.
And they wonder why I hate coming home.