“The Ides of March” Series … Prompt #15 – “This is how lonesome feels.”

“Not a person seems to know. Not a person seems to care. There is no one who believes a thing I say…
“Well, I’m fairly certain At one time or other, Great thinkers all feel this way …
“I’m all alone in the universe. So all alone in the universe. I’ve found magic but they don’t see it” (from “Seussical the Musical”).

All her life she’d known what it was like to be “alone.” She’d gotten used to it. It didn’t generally bother her to sit by herself in the theater, watch a show or sit at a table in a coffee shop alone or walk around campus with just her own pleasant company. It was simply the way life had always been. She never expected anything different. She didn’t have time to let it make her bitter because her life moved along at such a hurried pace that she didn’t have time to sit around and get depressed about not having someone at her side.

But then all at once, it would crash in over her head, and the loneliness became overwhelming. One too many of the love songs that she loved to listen to. Two too many romantic comedies. Enough talk of cute boyfriends and all that they did for their girlfriends. No one to always turn to and share every bit of her life with – no one to look forward to every single day when she woke up – and no comfort going to sleep because he was by her side. It was just her. By herself. And her dreams … which were achingly beautiful and painfully haunting at the same time. Her human nature curtailed her contentedness, and tears welled up without her bidding as those empty arms longed to just have someone to hold forever and ever. And as much as her heart longed for that fairy-tale, it had become so used to the absence that perhaps it didn’t believe anymore that it could actually come true.

Indeed, she wondered, what would it be like to not be lonely anymore? To not have to wonder and not have to keep shutting her dreams and imaginings off? What would it be like to actually be living out her dreams and experience what she’d always heard of and read and seen … what would it be like to have someone care about her more than anyone else and to tell her that she was beautiful and that he never wanted to spend another day apart from her, because she was his every dream come true?

Twenty-three years she had lived without it. Cheap imitations had come forth and tried to tell her they were what her heart was searching for, but she knew better. They weren’t what she was looking for. And did that mean she must live the next fifty-seven years alone as well? That perhaps she would never know what it meant to not be alone? Well, if that’s what He called her to, she believed that He would teach her the grace to get through it … but why did her heart refuse to believe it?

Because it had an infinite hope set deep within it … and she just couldn’t give it up quite yet. She knew somehow that He had created someone who was a perfect complement to her – someone with whom she could accomplish great dreams and crazy passions and grand schemes – He had a plan for them two, she just knew it, and she just had to keep holding on and keep nurturing her love for him. Because she knew that the most beautiful love is that which is cultivated over time and grown within a garden of patience and quiet confidence. She prayed that God would ever teach her faithfulness and make her worthy of that great man He was preparing to be her husband …