We mused together once (coffee cups cooling between us, or road stretched ahead—-the soul-talks blur), that to miss someone, to say it out loud, might be the most vulnerable thing.
What did we say? It means–
Your presence means something to me. Something important. You’re gone, and I feel that.
We giggled over our own stilted definition, but hmmming along knowing that saying so points to our chipped paint.
“I miss you,” means I’m missing something. It means admitting that I am somehow without.
I wrote out those words slow and scripty in a letter to a friend. I’m not sure I knew how much I meant it, how much like an eggshell edge it made me feel. That was almost a week ago, and I’ve been finding fragile pieces everywhere, in everything, since then. I’m anticipating upheaval, the turnover, the emptiness clothed in fulness of life that’s coming in four months when I move away.
Four months–a lifetime, a breath. I’m feeling it already. I mourn loss too soon or too late.
I think I’m starting to miss people while they are standing in front of me–scraping food off the plate, or handing me the phone–close enough to touch, to hold.
But I think, too, I’m starting to miss parts of myself.
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I think I’ve been missing God for a while now, and I realized the other day when I was doing the dishes that I’m not quite sure if or when we said goodbye.
Maybe this is the axle.
Maybe I’m at the wall (to quote Lauren Winner for the thousandth time), but mostly I’m pretty sure I’m running around trying to make noise in every other room of the house, refusing to slow down enough to acknowledge it’s there.
To slow down enough to say, I’m without.
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I ask, all frustration and self-chastising,
Why can’t I just get over this?
Why can’t I stop poking pouty sticks around in the dirt, like a child?
It’s Eastertide–why can’t I stand upright like the Resurrected?
She stops me, firmly,
This isn’t nothing. This is real.
I have this conversation again with another on the phone–the same why-can’t-I-tear-this-out-of-myself.
She tells me, soft,
Honey. You’re leaving your Camelot. You’re going this alone. It’s okay to feel it.
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The head-nod was important for calling out some of the shadows, the rattling echoes: to point and say, “I see it too, I hear it too.”
The anxiety, the dark is not made up.
And then the knowing that whispers,
but you have to do the work of starting over, love. Even if you start over every day.
These things do come without invitation, like a mean stray cat; but there’s a difference between watching it lurk on your stoop and letting it in the front door, feeding it your best.
I’ve learned that acedia, the restless-sadness-heaviness-sluggishness that comes to visit mind-body-spirit is edged out in the ways that don’t seem brave, or even faithful–like small acts of love, like listening, like seeking the things that once taught grace.
St. Thomas Aquinas writes that there are two paths for facing it, the sorrow in particular. The first we expect from the cerebral Doctor–we overcome the vice through grace with caritas, with virtue, with prayer, with perspective on our own troubles. Good counsel, if hard to grasp at times.
The second is more surprising–
A good night of sleep. A warm bath. A glass of wine.
Before I even take his advice, it catches in my throat.
It sounds silly, but here the saint points me to the Incarnated God, closer than my skin.
Bodily remedies for us as embodied souls, ensouled bodies.
Surely, He is not far from any one of us.
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The thing is, there aren’t any formulas, not really. We simply begin the work of starting over. Starting over every day.
stuff antonia says. 
