Somewhere in Between

I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately.

Not the kind of friendship we celebrate with birthday posts, selfies, or the occasional “love you, girl” comment on social media. I’m talking about the kind of friendship that quietly carries you through life. The kind where someone knows your history without needing an explanation. The person you call when your world falls apart. The one who notices when you’ve been quiet for too long and reaches out simply because you crossed their mind.

I don’t have that.

Writing those words makes me uncomfortable because they sound dramatic, and I don’t like being dramatic. I like being honest.

The truth is, I have people in my life. I have family. I have acquaintances. I’ve worked alongside people for years. I’ve been a prayer warrior, an advisor, a shoulder to cry on, and a listening ear for more people than I could probably count.

But when I quietly turned the question around and asked myself who had been those things for me, I struggled to come up with an answer.

There are evenings when the day is over, the responsibilities are finished, and the silence finally catches up with me. It’s in those quiet moments that I realize I’ve spent years trying to stay one step ahead of a loneliness that never really went away.

For a long time, I assumed it belonged to whatever season of life I happened to be in. There always seemed to be a reasonable explanation. Sometimes I thought it was because I was single. Then I remarried. I thought maybe raising my boys had simply left me too busy to notice it. They grew into men and built lives of their own. I wondered if becoming an empty nester had somehow made the loneliness louder.

But every explanation eventually fell short.

Every season of my life changed something.

None of them answered the question.

That’s what finally made me wonder if I’d been looking in the wrong place all along.

Maybe what I’ve been trying to understand isn’t simply loneliness.

Maybe it’s the absence of friendship.

There is one person who knows me better than anyone else in this world—my youngest son. He has watched me succeed, fail, question myself, rebuild myself, and become the woman I am still becoming. He loves me, he accepts me, and I thank God for the relationship we have.

But he is also my son.

As grateful as I am for the relationship we share, there are burdens that belong on the shoulders of a friend, not my child. There have been moments when I’ve desperately needed someone to talk to and found myself reaching for the phone, only to put it back down because I didn’t want my son carrying the weight of my loneliness.

No parent wants loneliness to become part of their child’s inheritance.

That’s when I understood I wasn’t simply looking for someone to listen.

I was longing for a friend.

Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned my husband. That’s a fair question.

In many ways, my husband knows me better than most people ever will. We’ve shared years of life together, and I don’t want to diminish that. But marriage and friendship, while they often overlap, aren’t always experienced the same way. We’ve walked through seasons that have changed how I carry parts of myself, and that’s a story I’ve written about before.

This story isn’t about the absence of love.

It’s about the absence of a friendship I’ve quietly longed for most of my adult life.

When I’m hurting, I usually carry it by myself. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I sit with my thoughts longer than I should. Sometimes I simply wait for the feeling to pass.

Most days, life gives me enough to do that I don’t have much choice but to keep moving. Work demands my attention. Marriage demands my attention. There are responsibilities to meet, projects to finish, and a life that still needs to be lived. Some days I’m simply too busy or too tired to notice the loneliness.

But it never really leaves.

It waits.

Then there are evenings when everything finally grows quiet.

The silence is deafening.

Those are the nights when I can’t lose myself in another chapter of my novel or another project around the house. Those are the nights when the tears come without warning, and I realize I don’t know who to call just to say, “I’m having a hard night.”

Maybe that’s the hardest part of all.

Not finally putting a name to what I’ve been feeling.

Not admitting that I’ve been lonely.

The hardest part is not knowing what comes next.

I don’t know how you build the kind of friendship I’ve spent my life longing for. I don’t know whether it’s something you find, something you build, or something that quietly grows over time. I only know that identifying the emptiness hasn’t filled it.

It has given it a name.