"We're all of us..." Tennessee Williams remarked "...sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life"

True, but a little harsh in my eyes; there's many a person with a rich and textured interior life who actively enjoy solitude. I do.

It's when solitude becomes desolation - the absence of anything even faintly intimate or hinting at companionship - that hurts. And this is, inevitably, an emotional hurt that pierces deeper than anything physical ever can. I've had my share (who has n't).

It can generate monumental imagery. I've never forgotten what someone once said to me after their very long term relationship had quietly sundered; their bed, once as cosy as a sofa was now a Siberian steppe of emptiness, with an orphan pillow on it with no head for it to rest on any more.