the difference between alone and lonely

This is the point in my life where for the first time in several years I am truly alone. I no longer have a longterm live-in boyfriend, I have no roommates, and I'm in a city where I have no safety net friends. While I have made the occasional bar-hopping friends from work that I might know me on a superficial level as the sassy, quick-witted New Yorker, what I truly long for are my Buffalonians. These are the people I've known since high school. The people who I don't feel the need to entertain. But most importantly these are the people that I know I could call at 3am just after the scene of some vicious crime and with no questions asked help me drag the body across the floor. I have yet to find anything close to that in Chicago and I suppose it does take time, but my heart hurts just thinking that it might never come.

What this time has shown me is the huge difference between simply being alone and what it feels like to be truly lonely. There are times when I do savor being alone, like after a particularly hectic day at work or when I want to dance around my living room with my music as loud as possible. But most of the time I'm reminded that there will be no standard phone calls at 7pm on a Friday night from the people that you know you have plans with regardless of ever actually having made them. I'm no longer a member of a standard group and with that I've somehow lost who I am as an individual. Although that sounds almost contradictory, it's the people we associate ourselves with that genuinely makes us who we are. It is through these relationships that we emerge as the listener, the comedian, the romantic...

So when will I be able to move from being lonely to content in just being alone?