Hazel Soto
Professor Ramos
English 101
09 October 2019
Lonely Never Leaves
The man woke up the next week and continued life just the same as he always has. The woman woke up the next week and continued life just the same as she always has. Every night the man would look up to the moon and talk to it, wondering if someone were talking back. Every night the woman would look up to the moon and talk to it, wondering if someone was talking back. The next night, a friday, the man got a text from an old college buddy inviting him out for drinks. The man tried to decline due to the fact that he had no money until the next week that he gets paid. His friend was persistent and insisted he go out and he would pay for the drinks.
The man hesitantly got up from his bed and got ready. He threw on some old boots, a black t-shirt, and some old jeans. He dragged himself across his loft to grab his keys and wallet. When he heard the honk outside he almost didn’t open the door. “I can make it through another night of acting like everything is fine.” He opens the door quick before he can change his mind.
As they drove to the bar his friend, Alejandro, began to speak about all his late night adventures. “She was wild, she would wrap her..”, Man stopped paying attention as his friend kept rambling on and on about how many girls he’s been with and all his adventures. Luckily the bar wasn’t too far from his house. Once they arrived all of his friends were shocked to see him out.
“How’d you get him to come out? He never comes out two weeks in a row,” all his friends said. For about an hour they sat at a table, drank and exchanged adventure stories which man had nothing to contribute to. He hadn’t been on adventures as they did. He spent long hours working, living pay check to paycheck.
“I’m going to go get another drink” Man said. The fact that all his friends had experiences he could never, made him feel closed off. He got up and lugged himself to the bar. He asked the bartender for another beer. He looked up and to his surprise he saw something that caught his attention. Across the bar was a woman. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was taller than average, black hair, caramel skin. She carried herself with such confidence. She was drinking with other women. The woman seemed like the life of the party. She was vibrant; radiant one can say. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He prepped himself to go talk to her “Come on. Be a man. Go talk to her. You can do this.” He looked down to fix his pants before going. “What am I thinking? I’m wearing worn out shoes and baggy clothes. A woman like that would never go for me. I can’t…. Okay you want to have stories to tell the boys you have to get out there. You can’t get the experience without putting yourself out there. You’ve come out today and made it this far. Just go.” He started walking. His legs were wobbling. Palms sweating.
He approached her and asked to buy her a drink. All her friends gave her that look. That look you give a friend to encourage them into a bad habit. She agreed to a drink with him. They moved to a different part of the bar, away from both of their friends. The Man immediately felt connected to the woman. The woman felt immediately connected to the man. The time flew by. They hadn’t realized how late it was getting until all their friends started leaving little by little, saying bye to them on their way out. When the moon was setting, they stumbled into a cab. Hands on each other.
Night turned into day. Days into weeks. Weeks into months. Lonely nights turned into late nights calls, talking of their goals and dreams, and skin to skin under the same sheets. At the end of each day, once the moon rose, the man and the woman stared out the window, talking about their hopes and dreams. How they loved the warmth of the arms that held them in those moments. It seemed like a movie. Those romantic, love stories where the prince slays the princess and lives happily ever after. But they never show what happens after the movie; they never show the screams of feeling taken advantage of, the pains of betrayal, or the long nights waiting for a reply. How the prince treats his princess when she’s just a regular woman to him now. Or how a woman can turn so cold towards the person she had just claimed she loved most. Because love is supposed to be like the movies. You meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. But it’s not.
Late night talks turned into arguments and lack of communication. Fridays they got paid became for friends. Freetime became for anyone else they could find. The future they planned together become a fairytale. The relationship had turned into a burden heavier than the lonely pit they used each other to fill. Night turned into day. Days into weeks. Weeks into months. The man went back to how he was before her. The woman went back to how she was before him.
“The man drank and drank with his friends and believed if he drank and drank, the words for what he was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually he simply drank and said nothing. The woman drank and drank with her friends and believed if she drank and drank, the words for what she was feeling would slip out more readily, but usually she simple drank and said nothing. Every other Friday the man drank his beer and laughed loudly. Every Friday in between the woman drank her beer and laughed loudly.
At home when the night came down and the moon appeared, the woman raised her pale eyes to the moon and cried. The man in his bed contemplated the same moon, and thought about the millions who had looked at the moon before him, those who worshiped or loved or died before the same moon, mute and lovely. Now blue light streamed inside his window and tangled itself with the glow of the sheets. The moon, the same round O. The man looked and swallowed” (Cisneros 133).
In Sandra Cisneros’s short story, “There was a man There was a woman”, she brings to light the universal feeling of loneliness. I wanted to continue her story to make the lonely souls meet and try to get happiness from one another. Eventually they realize that their relationship is based off a fantasy of filling the void of loneliness with one another causing the relationship to fall apart. Many people in real life think this same way. They believe that being in a relationship will fill the void of loneliness and fill them with happiness when it, in fact is not like that. “Different terms and definitions, such as infatuation, obsessive love, relationship dependency, or addictive love, have been used to describe relationship dynamics in which one or both partners display symptoms of dependency and in which true intimacy does not exist” (Charkow and Nelson). As previously shown in the text, true intimacy does not exist when people are dependent in a relationship. Another point is “Other factors cited in the literature as correlating with the maintenance of such (i.e., healthy) love relationships are high self-esteem, self-actualization, self-acceptance, and individual autonomy (Branden, 1988; Dion & Dion, 1988).” In “There is a Man There is a Woman” by Sandra Cisnernos, the characters portray a feeling of loneliness and unhappiness in themselves. The characters never revealed their true feelings to anyone around them, then went home where the woman cried and the man wallowed in his thoughts every night. This is also evident in other short stories written by her such as “Never Marry a Mexican” when a woman with low self-esteem becomes a mistress, trying to destroy the relationship between the man and his wife out of envy.
Dependence in a relation will cause the downfall of the relationship since it is not built on a healthy foundation. The feeling of loneliness will not go away with the company of another but with higher self-esteem and happiness from within.

Works Cited
Charkow, Wendy B., and Eileen S. Nelson. “Relationship Dependency, Dating Violence, and Scripts of Female College Students.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 23 Dec. 2011, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2161-1882.2000.tb00160.x.
Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Vintage Books, 1992.
Dion, K. L., & Dion, K. K. (1988). Romantic love: Individual and cultural perspectives. In R. Sternberg & M. Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love (pp. 264-292). New Haven, CT:. Yale University Press.

Google Image Result for https://dz9yg0snnohlc.Cloudfront.net/Selection-of-the-Best-Loneliness-Art-3.Jpg, https://images.app.goo.gl/2Cb5NL3aLmfh1sgH6.