Loneliness Has a Hell of a Marketing Problem

I feel like I have written about loneliness a few times, but it was sort of tangentially.  Lately,  the loneliness has felt a lot more tangible.  When most folks think about loneliness, it is about just being physically alone.  I used to think that too.  Then life introduced me to a wide variety of loneliness, and it turns out that lonely is a lot more complicated than having an empty house.  Don’t get me wrong, it is that, and it is so much more.

Over the last several months I’ve met many versions of loneliness that I never knew existed.   There is the obvious loneliness, like her side of the bed being empty.   The passenger seat in the truck being empty.  All of the control chairs, empty.  The shower, where she kept an extraordinary amount of products is now down to my three lonely little items sitting in a space that belonged to both of us.  And the emptiness of no “Mornin Beautiful”.

Those are actually the easiest versions to identify.  They are visible.  You can see the empty chair.  You can see the empty side of the bed.  That next kind of loneliness is harder because no one sees it.  The loneliness of touch is one that I have been struggling with and have already written about.  An empty hand when I am walking around.  No long hugs.  No sitting with my head in her lap watching Star Trek.  All of the casual ways we touch our person over the course of a day, all empty, all quiet and all of it sucks.  There is no way to prepare yourself for just how loud this emptiness is.

And then, eventually, loneliness gets even sneakier.  The missing touch isn’t just about what you don’t feel anymore.  It’s about all the little moments throughout the day when your brain still reaches for your person before it remembers they’re not there.   This is the loneliness that nobody sees but holds equal measure.  I have no one to tell funny stories to, as I would have today listening to a first date conversation when I stopped at Firehouse subs for lunch.  I really wanted to show her my coffee cup I painted to match the Brakes on the Galaxie.  What gets me is that split second when I think I still can.  These realizations come dozens of times a day.  This loneliness isn’t like a giant wound, it is a thousand tiny ones, and that sucks too. 

And eventually I realized there was yet another version of loneliness hiding underneath all of those little moments.  Like when I hear a funny story at Firehouse subs, it isn’t just that I have nobody to tell.  It’s that nobody will laugh at the same parts that she would laugh about.  No one else would know all the characters from forty years of stories that we could compare that couple today on their first date to.  No one else has all the context. 

Bride and I spent decades building our own little world to play in.  It was filled with inside jokes, vacation disaster stories, and all the stories we shared on our adventures.  We could tell a whole story just with a look across the room.  Hahaha, I miss that.   Over the decades, we built a Large Language Library, kinda like AI does.  Day by day we added context and stories and shared experiences, and inside jokes.  And we used it in so many ways.  And then one day, I found myself holding all those books by myself.  That is a different kind of lonely. 

As lonely as that can feel, it would be unfair for me to pretend I am walking through this thing alone.  I have amazing family, chosen and real, coworkers who check in on me, and people who have shown up in ways I never expected.  And that is when I discovered yet another version of loneliness.  You can be deeply loved and still feel lonely.  That sounds contradictory, and I guess the only way to experience that is to live through it.  I am blessed with an army of people in my life who care about me.  They want to and have helped in ways I will never be able to repay.  They have shown up, literally in many cases, and been present for me and I am grateful for every bit of it.  I’ve sat in rooms surrounded by people I love, people who were showing up for me in every way possible, and still I found myself looking at an empty chair wishing her cute little ass was sitting in it.

There is a harsh reality though, no one else lived inside that little world Bride and built one brick at time together.  No one else carries the same memories, the same experiences or the same context.  They understand pieces of the story. They understand the hurt, and they understand I miss her, as do they.  They will never be able to fully understand what it was like to be us.  And that is another version of lonely.  Maybe that’s what makes loneliness so hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.  Both things can be true at the same time.  It’s all strange but a standout in this has been the loneliness and being loved can exist at the same time, back to the paradox.  The dialectic nature of loneliness is so fucking weird.  And somehow, loneliness still had one more surprise waiting on me. 

As strange as all those versions of loneliness are, I think the one that catches me off guard the most is the loneliness of a missing future together.  I have heard grief is more about missing the past, and it is.  I miss a thousand yesterdays, actually 12,995 yesterdays.  Twelve thousand nine hundred ninety five days, and I wanted more.  I miss old vacations, I miss old stories, I miss all the moments that are already written.  What I did not see coming was how much I would miss the things that never will get written at all. 

The trips we were still going to take.  The projects we had in planning stages, and the conversations we were yet to have.  The version of us that neither of us became yet.  Sometimes I realize I’m not lonely for who Bride was.  I’m lonely for who we were still supposed to become.  I am lonely for the future that will never be. 

Maybe that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned through all of this.  Every time I thought I understood loneliness, it showed up wearing a different costume.  It’s not just an empty chair sitting across from me.  It’s not just an empty hand.  It’s not just having no one to tell the story to.  It’s not just carrying a library of memories by myself.  It’s not just being loved and still feeling alone.  And it’s not just grieving the future that never got a chance to unfold. It’s all of those things, and probably more to come, all at the same time. 

Loneliness wears a lot of costumes.  Sometimes it can look like an empty house.   Sometimes it looks a crowded room.  Sometimes is looks like an empty passenger seat.  Sometimes it can look like me in the garage saying, hey Beautiful come look at this.  Sometimes it can look like 12,995 days of memories by myself.  And sometimes it can look like the realization that there are new memories of us that will never get written. 

Loneliness has a hell of a marketing problem because most people think they know what it looks like.  I know better now.  And if you happen to be carrying your own version of lonely, whatever costume it’s wearing today, just know you are not the only one meeting it.  I know I sure needed to hear that myself.