Coming home to an empty house

It is not the whole day that is unbearable. It is one specific hour. For most people it is the one right after the door closes behind them, when the house is exactly as they left it and nobody is coming to change that. Keys in the bowl. The silence has a texture to it. You know the hour I mean, because you have been quietly dreading it since about three o'clock. That is the hour smoking was built to fill, and it knows the address.

So stop meeting it empty handed. A planned hour is a completely different animal than an hour that simply arrives. Decide now, while you are still calm, what the first fifteen minutes look like. Music on before the coat is off. A shower. The walk taken before you sit down rather than after. Cooking something that demands actual attention. Pick one thing and make it the thing you always do, so that the version of you walking through that door does not have to negotiate anything.

Then deal with what the silence keeps whispering, because the hour is not really the problem. Empty rooms are very good at offering a conclusion: this is what you are worth, this is the verdict, this is permanent. None of that is information. It is quiet, and quiet has no opinion about anyone. A room cannot assess whether you are lovable. You are drawing a life sentence out of an absence of noise, and you would never let another person make that argument to you out loud.

God is in that room and does not need it filled in order to be there. That is not a consolation prize, it is the actual fact of your evening: you are less alone in the house than the house feels. Get through the hour with your one planned thing. Once it is behind you, the night usually goes soft and ordinary and survivable. The hour is not a judgment on you. Tomorrow it arrives one notch smaller than it did today.