It is raining, hard. It is a rare experience to wake up to a heavy rain. A part of me wants to climb back into bed with my coffee and enjoy it. I still might do that. But first I want to write a little. My coffee is the perfect temperature. It is just a little bit painful as it hits the back of my throat. My feet are throbbing still from a twelve-hour day on Saturday at a market in Louisville. I can hear the dryer spinning my duvet cover, which was still wet when I stopped the dryer last night.

I am both lonely and happy. The happiness is the kind that emerges from the self if not restricted. I can feel the natural state of joy, of being. But one unexpected result of starting to finish my home renovations is that having a beautiful space to entertain without people to entertain, of creating magical corners for only me, underscores my loneliness. I do create for myself, but with this house in particular I think part of the reason why I made so many changes was a way of inviting in the family that I want: a partner, more kids, and also a chosen family of people that I love. As the renovations wind down, and none of these things have materialized, I realize that there was a certain amount of my energy, a certain amount of emotion, that I was expending on transforming the space, as if I was directing my loneliness, my longing, at this project. As it wraps up the loneliness and the longing accumulate without an outlet.

Now I experience a kind of hollowness in my own space. Being here underscores my own sense of having been abandoned in some way. Yes, my husband left, but I’m not even sure that is the cause. I think I’m talking about some unwritten contract which I perceived with the universe that said that if I showed up, was vulnerable and hard-working and a woman of integrity, that I would have a beautiful life. I do have a beautiful life, but somehow it feels like there has been some sort of violation. Someone has not come through for me. Many people have not come through. I can carry the weight of it to a certain degree but we seem to be tipping into a new place, a weight that I cannot carry. Each day I show up to the world wide-eyed, joyful, beautiful, but the string of characters that I am meeting just keeps changing. There is an injustice in the degree of change I absorb. Here is someone to love, someone to care for, someone to get to know, then they are gone in one way or another and then there is another. I am so worthy of being accompanied, witnessed, delighted in, and yet here I am still, at thirty-seven, yet to meet someone who is approaching me with open hands, wanting to walk with me, wanting to know me.

I believe the universe to be an abundant place but there is also something gaslighting about it, something in the laws of things that is not just. I am tired of the subtle reassurances: the hummingbird that visited me three times last week, the dancing birds on the powerline, the majestic sky. I am tired of the refuge of the natural world. I am weary of being a woman who needs refuge from her life, a life to which I have brought my whole self for so long. I don’t want to manifest or to envision or to dream. I want to possess. I want to live. Something about this phase feels like window-shopping, looking in but never invited in, always on the outside. Or am I the one on the inside? I have the sense of being on the Truman Show, being watched somehow, but in such an impersonal way that there is not the benefit of connection, only the paranoia of a presence that is unnamed, unreachable, never in physical form.

I don’t have the will to mourn, to hope, to invite. I don’t want to build something new. I want all the work I’ve done before to add up to something. Other people are building in containers worthy of their investment, in jobs, in relationships, worthy of them. I am always beginning anew, ever beginning. Nothing accumulates, except a wisdom I would be happy to live without, a wisdom I despise having earned through a persistent, quiet despair; a wisdom that separates me even further from those around me, living their normal lives, loved and accompanied.