While Diane has been attending a writer’s conference in Ireland, I have been home alone, left with the chickens and cats as company. I thought it interesting to observe what my experience is when we are apart, especially in an environment, Diane’s, now our home, where we have always been together.

I wondered what missing Diane actually feels like and it is not what most of the western love songs portray. It is not a heart ache, or an extreme longing, it is not a sudden sense of unbounded freedom as if I were single and by myself again. I do notice a little freedom to explore whatever I want with out thinking, “I better get home because I told Diane I would be home at such and such time.” As in the other day, I just dropped into the motorcycle shop on my way home on the spur of the moment and had a chat about different bikes. But there is a subtle and fundamental change in my life with out Diane physically here.

Even though we have emailed almost daily and skyped a few times, there is this emptiness. When I am working or rowing or exercising, I don’t experience it, but when I come home at night to the empty house there is no one to share my day with. My most intimate partner, with whom I share almost everything is not here. To share all the little tasks that make up a life together. To share the beauty of the moonlight when I go to put the chickens away. To share what we are grateful for as we go to sleep. So there is a flatness, a one dimensionality, to my life when Diane is not here, as if one important dimension of life has been taken away. Or the color has partly gone out of the fabric of my life.

This dimension of shared intimacy is both precious and fulfilling and something I think I have longed for most of my life. It is a sense of deep connection, of being known because I have revealed myself to another. I am living in a state of transparent authenticity with another on the physical level – at least as much as I can image possible on the physical level at this time.

I think it is why I have been looking so long for a partner with whom I could have this experience of shared intimacy and authentic transparency. And I am not sure I even knew how to describe what I was missing until I had it and now don’t.

For this, I am blessed to have Diane in my life and am counting the days and hours until her return. She is definitely missed!

All the best in life,
Landon