Wherever you're at, there's lots of us here with you, too.

There’s only so much I can divine from your absence. I hope you know I pick the meat from your words and the marrow from your silence.

I hope you know that with my silence comes a lot of meaning. From my docileness, a resignation. I stay busy but I’m not full; I’m merely trying to not empty completely from the hole that I feel in the middle of me.

I’m allowed to hate this, I tell myself. I’ve been trying so hard to find a way to embrace it and today I realize that maybe this is just something I can’t not hate. Maybe this is just something I rue. Because I pray, with desperation, that this temporariness won’t linger. Maybe I can’t abdicate from the 24 hour cycle that ultimately wrings me out.

And I find myself hoping that I’m not the only one who despairs at the simple and obvious tasks life asks of me. Surely I can’t be the only one who finds it so distasteful. Is there anyone out there, I think, that feels as sharply the little fees that are exacted? Do you?

And then I read the words “wherever you’re at, there’s lots of us here with you, too” and I cried for a different reason. I cried because I felt less singular in the eye of my storm. I felt you in the recesses of my pain, reaching out to me like roots through wet dirt. You, whoever you are, are here with me in this place I hate. You sit with me, hundreds of ghosts crowded around my bed side. You’re here too, praying for the cessation of something temporary. There’s no way for us to not hate this, but at least we have company.