I remember this feeling.

I like to refer to it as Grinding Loneliness.

And in my better days, I like to refer to it as Much - Needed Solitude.

Right now I am in a Grinding Loneliness verging on a Much-Needed Solitude kind of mood.

But I’m restless.  I considered signing up for JDate again.  Tell me: Noooooooooooooo, don’t do that.  JDate makes me compulsive.  I just have to check and see if anyone emailed me, who viewed my profile, who doesn’t mind if I have a kid, who isn’t interested in a relationship with a woman who has a kid but would be perfectly happy come over and, ahem.  I get really unhealthy around online dating.  So the compassionate thing is not to go back to that world that makes me crazy and to write instead.

What a novel concept.

I find so many ways to avoid writing, and JDate is one of the worst offenders.  I could spend all night chatting with guys about ridiculously inane things, instead doing that which truly nourishes my spirit - writing, and reading.

But I’d be lying if I said I don’t want someone here in this enormous king sized bed reading beside me.

How long do I have to wait to find love again?  I whine.

Leah, you’re so damn impatient,  I tell myself.  You just got divorced, um, not even three months ago.  Try this being on your own thing.  Just try it.  Try it today and then try it tomorrow and keep going through the Grinding Loneliness.  Keep going through the jealousy you feel when you see couples together on the playground with their kids.  These families are living their lives, so innocently, certainly not perfectly, and every married couple, no matter how happy they may seem on the outside, has an inner life I cannot even begin to guess at.  I know this.  Of course I do.  Yet I make everything and everyone else perfect.  I make myself Other, cast out, alone, defective, not enough, broke-ass single mama, my son, fatherless. 

We are rejected. 

This is not a nice feeling.

Keep going.  Go to where it hurts and keep going.  Keep going through the agony of seeing daddies everywhere.  Everywhere there are daddies loving their kids.  Everywhere there are husbands letting their wives take a break while they play with their kids at the pool, or at the playground.  There are daddies with kids on their shoulders.  There are daddies taking their toddlers for a ride on the choo-choo at Wheaton Regional Park.  I have written about this before, the Daddies that haunt me.  I stare at them sometimes, without even realizing I am doing it.  They are like alien beings and I am curious about them and their fatherly ways.  Sometimes they see me staring and look up.  I look away, embarrassed.  They probably pick up on my absurd longing, probably think I am checking them out but no, I am observing.  I am observing what a father in action looks like.

I cry as I write this and this is good.  This is better than going on JDate.  I need to grieve.  I need to cry.  I need to keep going.  This time, I do not want to run away.

It is so easy to run away.  How many ways there are.  Slowly, I feel my ways of escaping are being stripped away.  I tried the ultimate escape this summer, a geographical cure and it got me nowhere but here, in this place but in a different country.  Here.  This is the place I can’t stand to be, the place I’ll do anything to avoid and I need to meet it head on - on the page. 

I need to keep going, without the intoxication of a new man, the promise of a new man, the cat-and-mouse, the chase, the hunt, the hunter and the hunted, the guessing game, the He’s Just Not That Into You trip BS, or worse, He’s Way Too Into You trip.  The endless calls to my girlfriends about this one and that one.  It is exhausting, truly exhausting. 

I need to avoid the temptation of games with boys right now.  I’ve spent too long playing them and it has gotten me here, to this raw place where there is no where to hide, not really.  Do you think I didn’t try to re-join JDate tonight?  My profile no longer exists and I am simply too tired to create a new one. 

Describe myself in 50 words or less?

Forget that. 

I have a book to write! 

There is mercy in this, my exhaustion, my unwillingness to create a new profile and dive back into that world that tortured me last winter.  As resolute as I am right now, I have to admit that I still might go back. But for tonight, I write my way into this emptiness, not knowing where this journey will take me.  I write with an enormous stack of books as companions piled next to me on the bedside table, the fan whirring overhead, the cicadas outside chirping the death knell of summer.