Feels crazy that today would have been our ninth year in Atlanta. Four months into this new move, I think often of that first year. We were so lonely, living for Sunday since it was our only day of connection with other people outside our immediate family.
Gradually, through sports activities, chorus and youth group, the kids slowly amassed a gang of friends and with kid friends comes moms who ultimately become your friends. Thus life evolved and grew into the normalcy of our human interactions. Shared coffees. Shared lunch dates. Shared conversations and bearing of hearts led to deep friendships that time and distance will not un-forge.
And yet in this new place, for the sake of my avoiding my own spiral down into the black hole of despair, I find myself desperately hanging on to this remembrance. Knowing takes time. I know this (in my head), and yet with no kids to broker the “friends by default” deal, it all feels daunting. And the loneliness compounded that much more.
I find I’ve almost forgotten the volume of my own voice. I speak so little these days, I’m acutely aware when others lean in to hear. I eat alone. I go to the gym alone. I drink coffee alone. I wander aimlessly through this new city alone. I have always been good alone with my own self, but not having the option to choose alone versus always being alone feels daunting.
The other day I told a friend, “Loneliness is a deep ache.” To which she replied, “Being alone is treasured time partly because we know we can go back into the warm embrace of other people and places. We know we are known…if only in part. What you’re describing feels like being stranded. It is a world with no mirrors….and it’s literally terrifying. And it’s not because we’re not trying hard or because there is no beauty…it is because there is no recognition.
I gasped as I read my friend’s words. Her words invited me “to bear witness with my loss and hold faith for a bright dawn.” I’ve been here. Nine years ago. Having left the comfort and familiarity of life in Virginia. We set out for a new place. As I said to my friend, Jen, “Stranded is an apt description - kind of in between homes almost.”
From the ache of not being known and not knowing, the deepest, most beautiful friendships were forged. It took time. But it happened. May life be as kind to create for me again beautiful, soul baring friendships. There are treasures in the desert and my heart says yes to them.
