It’s 11:00 pm on a Tuesday night in August. The temperatures feel like early fall and the windows are open. From the kitchen I can hear the hum of the refrigerator, but mostly I hear the outside chorus of crickets and katydids and the occasional car passing by. Earlier tonight I sat on the deck with a glass of wine and thought about the long light of late summer – when everything is golden just before dusk.
I couldn’t sleep. After my usual (not very good, healthy, or productive) nighttime routine of scrolling social media, setting my alarm, and going to bed, I found myself feeling restless, resigned, and little despondent. My thoughts flitted and floated. I rolled over to face the middle of the bed. The emptiness hit me. It was almost as if in rolling over, I half-expected someone to be there. I felt this mental sigh and heard my inner voice lamenting… sometimes, I’m really tired of being alone. This felt like the first time I had ever said that to myself. It felt like a deeper type of longing that could easily slide into feeling sorry for myself. It didn’t feel like a manly admission: missing having someone next to you at night. It brought with it a level of shame – as though wanting a partner of sorts is relegated to the emotionally insecure or shallow – to those who are afraid to be alone – a character in a Jane Austen novel. I immediately tried to add all types of qualifiers to my thoughts, to soften the “neediness” into something that sounded more like, “it would be nice…” I tried to imagine how I might tell my story to someone new – as though explaining a significant gap on my resume. Aside from my brief engagement, this (going to bed alone) has been how I’ve lived for the past seven or eight years – which feels like a long time.
The only thing that prevents this train of thought from sliding off the rails and into the muddy ditch of self-pity is that any sense of loneliness I feel seems more about circumstance than anything else. I don’t really question whether or not I’m a good guy or a good potential partner… I have fond memories of feeling deeply connected. If anything, I feel like I’m wasting away a bit and losing daylight, like I have things to offer that are untapped. But more than that, I’m just not sure I want to go through all that searching and trying again… I had met a lot of people before I got engaged – I was pretty sure I knew what I was looking for and even more sure I had found it. The thought of going through that process again seems tiring and unlikely to yield better results. Furthermore, even if I could get excited about the process, it’s pretty much a non-starter here where the population of viable candidates seems decidedly below five.
And all of that’s ok – except sometimes, tonight especially, it felt a little less ok. It felt like I’ve been missing out on the simple fullness of life – the shared moments of quiet over coffee in the morning, the toast to each other in the evening, saying goodnight or good morning or hey, I was thinking about you. I can’t remember the poem or tweet or essay that I read not too long ago, but the author lamented the language that gets lost between two people when things end. Close couples develop inside jokes and a shared vernacular – they understand eye contact, body language, and nonverbal cues, they learn a certain type of dance in their every day routines. Maybe that’s what I was missing as I rolled over to the empty pillows beside me – that sense of security and knowing, curiosity and safety found in the proximity, breathing, or light touch of another – that strange and soft chorus in the summer night that we often take for granted and sometimes dismiss as noise.