Feelings

(No, I'm not going to hum a few bars here of an oversung old song.)

I have a journal that I've been keeping for almost two years now. It's a five-year journal with 366 pages and five sections on each page. When I write my entry for each day, I can look back to the previous year and surrounding days to see what was going on in my life. It's manageable for me, as the space allotted for each entry is only about a paragraph. No unstructured blank pages are staring at me, overwhelming me.

Until about six weeks ago, I was religious about writing in the journal daily. But lately I neglect it. About once a week I pick it up and write "work, rehearsal" or "work, Snell & Wilmer party" or "laid in bed until 9" on the appropriate pages.

I'm recording no feelings, no impressions, nothing of substance. And I realize that's because I have no feelings. Well, I have feelings of sadness at being away from the babies at Christmas (for the first time since Boston's birth), but aside from that sadness and the angst over getting this house boxed up and decluttered around here to show the house, I feel nothing.

Oh, wait. I feel envy for those couples I see around me who have relationships and a loved one to talk to. Last night at the end of intermission, I saw my friend Shawn (horn) signal to her husband Mike (trombone) and he walked over so they could talk for a few minutes before the second half started.

I feel — oh, devoid of feelings. Emptiness is not a feeling, but that's what I feel. And I wonder if this is to be the beginning of many, many years of emptiness until one day I die.

I realize that's the problem with being widowed from a very good marriage at age 48. There's the possibility that my life was not yet half over at that point.

Could aloneness be equated with peace and calm? The marriages of ten, five and two-and-a-half years, all filled with so much unhappiness, and the four years with Steve, which were an absolute nightmare — are they the antithesis of the next [possibly] forty years of "peace".

If loneliness is peace, I'm not sure that's what I want.