Do you know what’s so painful, what causes me grief on the weekends now? Knowing that life is just chugging along for everybody but me. That no matter what I plan? I feel utterly alone.

There is no cure for the panic. For the reality that awaits me when I get home. That Spencer is GONE gone. Not coming through the door never again.

Despite immediately changing rooms from the room we shared, painting and then changing so many aspects of my outward appearance? Many more days than not I sit in my car not wanting to come inside because he won’t ever be waiting for me. Door closed or not, he won’t ever step outside the room, won’t ever grab me from behind, won’t ever ask me what we eating, won’t ever text me to tell me he’s on the way home, won’t ever. Won’t ever.

Twenty years of one person who never showed up for anybody or anything consistently except me—and he finally tapped out.

Meanwhile. People are still getting married. Still going out. Still having babies. Still making plans. Still traveling. Still graduating. Living and loving and dying and I feel like everything has just been one big groundhog’s day. Me coming home wishfully needing him to just be here one more time for me consistently himself. And me sitting in my car trying to avoid the inevitable disappointment of opening the garage and he ain’t never gone be here again.

To say this evening has been been rough is a blatant understatement of the raging howl that keeps rising up in my chest and flooding my throat. But it is no different than any of the other ones that preceded it. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Eventually I gotta come home. To the silence of his absence.

My goodness. I am not cut out for this kind of felling.

I meant feeling but I think felling is probably just as appropriate. I have been cut down into something I do not recognize. It is frightening, and I am just whistling in the dark, listening for the Lord to say which way to go real quick so I can run up out of this stillness that just blankets me like a never-lifting fog.

I want to put on the garment of praise but what comes out is me wanting to ask, “How can I sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?”

So I don’t say anything at all. I look like I’m suffering well, and I am not. I’m simply suffering.

I miss Spencer. More than I KNEW I would.