Loneliness

I've been single for a long time and I've been content with it for just as long. But lately I'm looking at my life and feeling the lack of a man to love, to just hang out with, for the first time in ages. The silence in the house at night is so deep. The fact that my dog is the only male whose head is on the pillow beside me is not quite as cute as it used to be. The hours spent reading or watching television at night alone seem to be weighing me down as they never have before. I have no buddy. And the sense that I will be alone for the rest of my life without one is making me feel pretty sad just now.

A dear friend recently has separated from her husband, whose behavior has reminded me very much of my former one as I've listened to her. It's been hard to remain objective, to leave my buried baggage behind when she and I have talked, though I've tried. Maybe that's what's churned this up within me just now. And I've been helping my son and daughter-in-law plan a belated celebration for their wedding/one year anniversary recently. While I'm looking forward to it when it happens, I also know I'll be there alone again. The dumped wife who never got it together with anyone else, you know? It's not the most positive way to look at myself, I know, and I don't often think of myself that way. But I know that I'll be there, see him with her, and will enter, mingle, relate and respond to people with a smile on my face and knot in my gut till it's over and I can retreat. This is NOT the way things were supposed to be. And it sucks.

Will I ever do anything about this? Probably not. My heart is functioning but there is no heat or passion pumping through it. And something just plain broke inside me when my marriage, my life, fell apart. I respect those women who pick up the pieces and build a new life with someone else when things don't go as planned. And I know how strong I am, how much I've overcome and learned. It shouldn't be this hard to take a chance, to step out of what people stupidly call the "comfort zone". But my fear of trying and losing at love again is so enormous I can't move past it. The "alone thing" hasn't really bothered me much till now. It gets me at Christmas, when I don't have a man to shop for. I used to love that and I miss it every year, though I've learned to zoom past the men's departments as if I'm on speed. It nags at me at social things -- weddings, dinner parties, martini nights at my friends' -- when I don't have a dance partner or someone to share dessert or chat about it with over coffee the next morning. I've staved off a lot of that stuff pretty well till now and avoided the "poor me" thing. But now....getting older, seeing my kids carving out their lives with their partners so beautifully, working too hard for my age, seeing my parents failing a bit more, having no siblings...the future seems like something that is going to be very quiet, very predictable and, yes, lonely.

One of my idols, Joni Mitchell, wrote a wistful song titled "My Old Man" that I still love to sing. When her guy, so good at "keeping away my blues" is gone, she sang, "The bed's too big, the frying pan's too wide". Pretty much says it all, eh? The space around me isn't feeling empty just because there's no man in it. That's a part of it, for sure, and I have to admit that. But it's also empty because as I look ahead I don't have hope of that space feeling fuller or warmer than it does now. That lack of hope is why I'm feeling a little empty on these summer nights. More than a little.

I miss .... love.