How do you keep up with the hours once someone is gone?
It is something I’ve struggled with forever.

My entire life has been punctuated with types of loss: the grieving kind, the out of state kind, the too far gone to call up and talk again kind. The kind I am living through now is a new one for me. I’m unsure how to interpret it, how to deal with it. I’m calling it the empty without you kind.
It is how I feel right now, in this very exact moment. Drinking coffee I’ve mixed with chai, listening to endless loops of monotonous sounds, staring down my weekly agenda, feeling like I could rip apart every single little ticky-box and accomplish everything possible, but still, with that low hum that now feels more real than it has been over the eight-and-a-half-months I’ve been doing this thing.

In short, Magen has gone home after the week we spent together and I am missing her. And in a way, I’ve always missed her but it’s hard to express when you never really had the person in your presence anyway. How do you miss someone when they never arrived, when they never actually left because they were never there. I dealt with that too and now that it’s over and done with, the feeling is even more prevalent, going around with stained eyes. Everything seems a bit more dull, a bit more drab. There is a whole lot less to look forward to when your vacation, when your favourite person on the tiny planet has gone back to their home. Their home that is nowhere near your home.

It is a bit tiresome, really.

But how do you keep up the hours? You decide to take advantage of your time alone and get the things you want to get done, well, done. You resolve to get your driver’s license and you apply for second jobs and you begin new drafts of projects and dust off outlines of old stories. You remind yourself to exercise just a bit harder to keep everyone on track and you take on big home improvement projects like pulling the paper down in your bathroom. You start blogging again. You stop caring that you’re cultivating the world’s worst memoir on the internet and just run with it. You start mixing your caffeine. You start wishing desperately for daily Zumba again.

You do you, really. You become yourself again. But it’s tough in a way that isn’t really tough at all, it just is something you no longer want to do. A week is never enough and maybe, if you’re lucky, forever isn’t enough either. And I’m only on the first step of knowing that. If I can figure it out, it won’t be a loss at all and it won’t be killing time between here and there.

Eventually there will be a home and a quiet life and a room full of bookcases from Ikea. For now, there’s my desk at work and the too tall chair and the list of things to get done, to become a better person. Because when I see you again, baby, I want to be a better person.