The table was loaded with the wreckage of the birthday breakfast.

It. Was. A. Mess.

Cold leftover scrambled eggs on several plates.

Sticky syrup, half empty juice cups, chairs pushed back, cloth napkins scattered across the table top.

My life felt exactly like that table.

It was a crystal clear moment.

This table is my life.

A gigantic mess that I am left alone to clean up.

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I think that’s a picture of what loneliness can feel like sometimes, you know.

And while most of us are living lives that don’t stay in the lonely all of the time, I’m pretty certain we’ve all lived a life that has, on occasion, felt just like that.

A messy table, everyone else outside playing in the sunshine, and all the garbage patrol duties resting on your solitary shoulders.

I get it.  It’s heavy and it’s dark and it is alone.

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Once I wrote about how quickly the tone of my blog posts can shift, the highs and the lows from day to day that the writing can take.

It’s like you could get whiplash from reading my blog posts.

I write that way because that’s pretty much how I’ve found life to go.

The rollercoaster of good and bad moments, both sometimes as quick moving as the birds that have been rapid fire visiting our feeders this first week of spring.

Honestly, it feels as if my own life is giving me whiplash right now.

The parts of my life that are increasingly beautiful.  And the parts of my life that are increasingly terrible.

Eh.  Maybe the word terrible is too dramatic.

But I feel dramatic some days.

Whatever.  Most days.

It’s a language I do not know how to speak.

This language of divorce.

The language of After.

The language of Left Behind.

And, of course, it’s a language I never wanted to learn.

I didn’t grow up as a child of divorce.

I had zero intentions of raising children with that abysmal label attached to their lives.

And yet.

Here I am.

The words floating around my head and the title like a brand on my chest.

There have been few things in my life I have been so utterly incapable of changing as this.

And so there are days when the whiplash between what is good in my life and what is bad in my life feels quite shocking.

When the choices I alone am responsible for making weigh heavy on my mind and my heart and my savings account.

The stack of fantastic friends cannot decide what needs deciding.  (Perfectly imperfect sounding boards though they may be.)

That audible voice from heaven cannot be heard and the neon finger pointing the way has gone dark.

And there’s a yes or a no that needs to come from my lips only.

That’s what Lonely can feel like too.

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