Solitude
Since my wife died, I have been lonely.
It has been a year today and a moment doesn’t go by that I don’t feel her absence. After all, we’ve been together for 18 years. It was so unexpected, I can’t think of anything more shocking.
I’ll always have the biggest place in my heart for her. She was a very special lady and the only reason she’s dead is because she was given the wrong meds at the hospital. But I digress.
I miss my friend, partner, and soul mate. And it's hard. And it hurts, not only deeply but intensely.
To cope with depression and to try to distract myself, I started writing more than I’d ever done before. That worked and I'm still at it but that endeavor brought me a new set of problems.
Or maybe they are discoveries.
Because it’s difficult when you’re deep in thought and for an instant you’ve forgotten "it", so you turn around and your beloved isn’t there. You wanted to share what you just found super interesting but there’s an empty space instead.
You look at the chair she always sat on and she's no longer sitting there. And a thousand other bits that remind you that she is, in fact, gone.
The only way I can write is when I’m alone and at peace. But I don’t want to be alone and at peace. I want to interact with the essence of her being, discuss trivia, and have little arguments and silly fights only to make up and laugh about it. She had a wonderful melodic laughter.
The best part of a relationship. Togetherness and forgiveness.
Loneliness is hard. Especially when you’re not used to it. I bleed inside and sometimes it’s a hemorrhage. I’ve never been alone before but I’m alone now and it feels as strange as can be. Especially since it was so unexpected, and sudden, and since it caught me completely off-guard.
Such is life. And such are the hard lessons of it.
My friends are all dead or gone from my life, living mostly with their families in faraway places I used to call my own. I'm an Alien in my own world, inside my own skin. How is that possible? I hurt a pain that I didn't know existed. The pain of solitude. And it hurts because it is constant.
Solitude. The only thing I knew about it is from that amazing book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A hundred years of Solitude" which I couldn't read now if I tried.
Yes, I hurt. It’s a hurt that is inescapable, ever-present, and corrosive. It gnaws ever so slowly at the deepest corners of my being, at my now buried soul, and goes ferociously straight for the core.
So much that it feels almost vindictive.
You try your damnedest to go on about your life, you try to adjust. But life insists on reminding you. You change the location of the items that she was recently using, hoping that it'd make a difference, and still, doesn't. It just gets worse.
Your mind tells you to remember the grand ole saying, "Everything Shall Pass" and you hold on dear to that belief and repeat it in your head a million times to keep your sanity. Because it's all you got. Because she ain't coming back.
And you have to go on. And live, write, and take her in your heart through every experience.
For old-time’s sake.
That’s what she would’ve wanted.
(Dedicated with all the love in the world to Donna Marie)
