The Internet complements modern loneliness so well that, at times, it appears to be solely a digital projection of that yearning. You check the spam folder in your Gmail account to make sure no personal message got hung up there, you scan the Craig’s List Missed Connections ‘just for the entertainment value,’ you Facebook-stalk your crushes/ your ex/ your ex’s friends/ your friends’ exes/ your ex-friends exes’ crushes. You watch some porn and then you turn off your computer in disgust and watch Good Will Hunting or Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind or even, Jesus H. Christ, Dr. Zhivago and then fall asleep hating yourself.

But when that dream of love is set free in the potent imaginarium of the Internet, we become not who we are but who we wish to be, and the objects of our desire become so overburdened with perfection as to be inhuman. When fantasy trumps reality, well, the results can be disastrous. Enter a sweet young thing named Johna Chase.

Johna was a random girl who started following me on Twitter nearly three years ago—a tiny, inconsequential connection. Then we corresponded. Then she shared with me a compelling photograph. Then, from that photograph, I imagined an entire universe. My nascent intrigue with Johna built slowly and then exponentially in intensity, finally climaxing in a nightmare involving the police, a court battle and two suicide attempts. Nearly three years later, the nightmare still hasn’t fully gone away.

[Excerpt from ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT]

Excited as I was that Johna had shown interest in me, I wasn’t trying to score with her. I mean, of course I was, I’m a guy, but that wasn’t the horizon line. I was drawn to her by the prospect of love, true love, that great letting-go. I wanted to feel again like I had when I was seventeen and I hitchhiked across the country to see my girlfriend or when I was twenty-seven and living out of my van and I tattooed my girlfriend’s name on my clavicle. Yes, me, a grown man and still a slave to that intense crush of emotion like the levee breaking and being suddenly hopelessly overpowered and swept away by a wall of black water.

Premature? Yeah, of course. But it had been four years since my last serious girlfriend. Sure, there had been a couple of brief, promising interludes and a couple of half-assed, abortive attempts and certainly drunken hookups but even if not all of them have ended with screaming and crying in the street, the end result has always been the same: me, alone in the loveless squalor of my apartment, pounding some poison, snorting some powder, swallowing some pill.

Ugly truth be told, I was happier or at least more comfortable alone with my chemicals. Regardless of how banal or exotic they are, substances are reliable. They do what they’re supposed to do: they transport you from your current reality. If the first dose doesn’t work, just order another whiskey, eat another pill, do another line and eventually, you will achieve your escape. It’s true that at times I have been sold bunk mushrooms or acid but that’s been the exception, not the rule. Human beings, on the other hand, rarely do what you want them to, particularly lovers. You want a lover to comfort you, to engage with you, to agree with your peculiar worldview, to make you laugh and to laugh at your jokes. It’s true, sometimes they do all of these things and more, but more often, you are ignored, dismissed or mocked. And finding someone to love is notoriously difficult. It seems that either there is no connection or there is a brief, intense connection and then you are hideously betrayed.

People told me I was stupid for spending my money on drugs but chasing love is the equivalent of spending most of your waking hours and much of your disposable income trying to find someone to sell you fake ecstasy. Nine times out of ten, nothing happens—it’s not even ecstasy, it’s a fucking multivitamin or an antacid. You loathe yourself for being so hopeful as to deceive yourself and your friends ridicule your stupidity and desperation. On the rare occasions that anything happens, nine times out of ten, it’s a bad trip, and it takes forever to come down. When it is finally, finally over, you swear to yourself that you are done for good, you are never trying that shit again. Yet somehow, regardless of how hard it is to find a batch that does anything, let alone anything good, people are frantic to invest in it. In fact, it seems like the worse their experience has been with this bunk, the more eager they are to sign up for more bad times. If love were a drug, I would have only ever tried it once. Even then, I probably would have threatened physical violence until I got my money back.

And sex without love—solely physical satisfaction—is hardly a cure for loneliness. Sleeping with strangers is, as Mike Watt put it, merely “scientific wrestling.” You worry about your student loans, you think about Sasha Grey, you pray your downstairs neighbor is a heavy sleeper. When you are in love, when you truly give yourself over to love, you are gratefully consumed by the other person and sex is the annihilation of any and all barriers to communication.

The few times when I was able to overcome my bitterness and try sincerely at a real relationship, it’s like there were three people in the room. There was me, the unfortunate object of my affections and then there was my poison. Time after time, women bailed on me because they felt like a third wheel. I honestly can’t say that I blame any of them. Intoxicants held my attention like no human being could. They were my first love and anything—or anyone—came in a distant second. I remained alone.

As a child, I had been fascinated by the rectangular black magnets on our fridge; how, turned one way, it was impossible to make them touch but turned the other way, they clung together and were nearly impossible to separate. I felt like I had spent half my life doing my best to keep women close to me at arm’s length. I felt that Johna could reverse my polarity and it was this sudden rushing together that I ferociously anticipated. I knew it was foolish but Johna’s face seemed to hold the promise of a new life—a new me. After years of implicit warnings, explicit warnings and new lows rolling under my tires with nary a bump, I had finally quit my drinking, drugging and lowdown, evil ways in general. Maybe now, with that rotten business out of the way…

One night I dreamt that she was laying next to me: her warm, sleeping skin almost humming with life, her eyelashes fluttering ever so slightly, like a dreaming child’s. The air around her sleeping form gaped with possibility and I conjured long, swirling, operatic hallucinations of our variant lives together. When I woke in the night, I reached for the spot where she had lain. I could have sworn she had been laying there by my side in the darkness.

Read the full story HERE.

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Mishka Shubaly is the author of three bestselling Kindle Singles on Amazon: The Long Run, Shipwrecked and Are You Lonesome Tonight? He plays bass in Freshkills and is currently working on his next solo record. Stalk him on Twitter: @MishkaShubaly