It Was The Two Of Us And Now It Is One

The days are all right.

That is the thing nobody would guess from outside. The days are genuinely all right. There is work, there is the shop, there are people who speak to you, and by half past five you have generally forgotten to feel anything about anything.

It is the evenings.

Specifically it is the stretch between about seven and about ten, and even more specifically it is not the loneliness people imagine. It is not that there is nobody to talk to. It is that there is nobody to not talk to.

For nineteen years there was another person in the building. Not necessarily in the room. Often upstairs, often with a door shut, often communicating nothing more than the sound of a floorboard or a tap running. And that presence was doing something you never once noticed, which is that it made the silence into a shared silence rather than an empty one.

Now the floorboard does not go. And at about twenty past eight the house makes a noise it has never made before, which is no noise at all.

And here is the part that has been quietly hard: you cannot say any of this to anybody, because a woman who says the evenings are difficult sounds like a woman who needs something, and you have spent nineteen years being the one who does not need anything.

For I am desolate

There is a line in the Psalms that people find uncomfortable, because it is somebody saying the thing plainly.

Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted. (Psalm 25:16, King James Version)

Desolate. It is not a word people use about themselves anymore, and that is a loss, because it is exactly the right word for a house at twenty past eight.

Look at what he does with it. He does not describe the situation and hope somebody works it out. He does not open with an account of how well he has been managing. He says the word about himself, out loud, in a song that other people were going to sing, and he asks for mercy in the same breath.

You are allowed to use the true word about your own evenings, and naming a house as empty has never once been the same thing as complaining about it. Psalm 25:16 has a man saying he is desolate in a public song, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a front room at twenty past eight.

And notice who is speaking. This is not a person with nothing in their life. This is a psalm attributed to a king, a man with a court and an army and a great many people around him during the day.

The days were all right for him too. The verse is not about a shortage of people. It is about a particular kind of aloneness that a full schedule does not touch.

You have a real thing and not an ungrateful one, and a busy day has never once been able to reach the part of the evening that is hard. The Spirit of God is the one who does not require a person to be pitiable before He will come, and the written word puts the word desolate into the mouth of a man surrounded by people.

What actually left the house

Now let me be precise about the loss, because precision helps here more than sympathy does.

What left is not company. Company you can arrange. What left is the second presence: the person whose being in the building meant that nothing in the evening had to be decided alone, from what is for dinner to whether the noise outside matters.

And there is a second thing, and it is bigger. For nineteen years, everything you did in that house was for somebody. The meal was for somebody. The tidying was for somebody. The early night was so you could manage tomorrow, for somebody.

Now you stand in the kitchen at seven and there is no for. And an evening with no for in it is a strange and disorienting thing, and nobody warns anybody about it.

You are living in an evening with no for in it, and not knowing what to do at seven o'clock has never once meant a person has lost their purpose. Psalm 25:16 asks God to turn toward one person specifically, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns toward a woman standing in a kitchen with nothing to make.

I want to name the fear underneath, because it is the one nobody says.

The fear is that this is now the shape of the rest of it. That the evenings are not a stage but a preview. That nineteen years of being needed was the busy middle of a life and this is what was always going to be underneath it once the noise stopped.

The quiet at eight o'clock is not a verdict on the whole of what is left.

You are looking at a season and not a sentence, and one hard stretch of evenings has never once been a reliable report on the years in front of you. Psalm 25:16 is a request in the middle of a life rather than a description of its end, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows which part of a life a person is standing in.

Say the true word to one person

So here is the practical thing, and it costs more than it looks like it costs.

Tell one person this week that the evenings are the hard part. In a plain sentence. And do not add the words it is fine.

That last clause is the entire assignment. You will get the sentence out, and then something in you will immediately produce a softener: it is fine really, it is just an adjustment, everybody says it takes a term. Do not add it. Say the true thing and then let there be a silence, and let the other person be the one who fills it.

You are able to say a hard thing and leave off the softener, and a sentence with nothing added to it has never once been a demand on anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody in the second after they have not said the softener, and it is written in Psalm 25:16 that a man said plainly he was desolate and asked for mercy in the same breath.

Here is why this matters so much for you specifically.

Nineteen years of being the only adult in a household builds a reflex, and the reflex is that your own difficulty is a thing to be managed privately so that it does not become anybody else's problem. That reflex was correct and necessary and it kept a family standing.

It is now working against you, because the household it was protecting has a different shape, and the protecting has become a wall around a woman who does not need to be behind one.

You are able to put down a reflex that has finished its work, and a habit that was right for nineteen years has never once had to be right forever. Scripture records the plain asking without any apology attached to it, and the same Spirit who kept that verse in the book is with you when you leave off the words it is fine.