The Void Don't Live Here

Uno
I run through my daily digest of forum threads, blogs, emails, the websites I visit, and I end up still feeling frustrated. Maybe today no one is "talking". There is nothing exciting on any of the sites. Maybe I am just not finding what I am "looking for" here. The question is, will it ever be enough? I mean, how many friends, activities, online forums and virtual friends does one need to have to really fill the void, or is it even possible?
I wonder what is wrong with me. It is not like I should be lonely. I have a husband and two little kids who keep me busy. Most of my friends who are raising their children are too busy to get online at all, or to have a social life outside the home.
I have my dog shows and classes. I have my church, where I can talk to like minded people twice a week. I can go to Sunday School, to the worship service, and to Wednesday night Bible Study, and be surrounded by positive people who are interested in my spiritual life and geniunely care for me.
I have my old friends from high school, my old friends from college (or around the age of college), my former team members from the EC, my old friends from the day practice I was at: everywhere I work, I form close friendships with other women that I can't imagine ever losing.
I have my geocaching friends, including the two women I have become close to, and many others that I see at events about once a month or so. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I am in our local forums, talking to these people, or maybe just watching the threads. I go into the main website forums and sometimes talk there, sometimes make friends with people I have never seen.
I have my enrichment forum, my human-animal bond listserve, my primate listserve, my dog show listserve. I am on the dog breeder's email list and get email from other people I have met along the way in the dog world.
I have my blog, with the links to other blogs of people interested in some of the same things. I have blogs saved on my favorites. I link to other people's blogs off my profile. I have my myspace page and my myspace friends, some I know and some I've never met, and sometimes I link to friends of friends of friends of fellow myspacers. I've had long posts back and forth with myspace people I've never met in person.
I still don't feel socially fulfilled. I have decided that this is because I am a complete freak with some emotional blackhole down inside. Sure, it could be because my husband and I have no real partnership. He pretty much ignores me and I him, or else we are fighting. Sometimes we try to do things together, but it always ends badly. Sure it could be because I don't have that special best friend anymore that I spend all my time with, like the girls of my past. Sure it could be just a temporary phase I am going through, some kind of soul stagnation before the big epiphany. Maybe I just need a soulmate.

Absence

Dos

I go to pick my friend Lara up from work. She tells me I sound sad today and asked what was going on. I told her about the above-mentioned. She says, "Nothing is wrong with you. You're fine. I totally understand what you mean, though. Sometimes I feel the same way. It's normal." We get in the car and drive off, and suddenly I don't feel the void anymore.

It hits me that it is all about presence. I feel lonely because I am not with people. The virtual world does not compare with actually being with someone. I could spend time with the friends I mentioned above, but I don't reach out to them when I am feeling alone. I don't call them when I really need to talk to someone or feel isolated from the world. Sometimes, when I am with those people, the ones who know me but don't really know me, I am not my true self.

I know I am a multi-faceted person. I have many parts to my Self, and I show just a few parts to most people. There are only a few that know all of me, see all my sides. Some friends say that maybe I am not being genuine, or I am hiding things from people, because of this, but I think they just are oversimplifying it. We all kind of do this to a degree, show only the sides of us to others that we think they will accept. Most people just can't accept all my sides because they think in black and white, and therefore my duality of being confuses them. I can't be all bad or all good, but I am little of both. Aren't we all like that?

With Lara, I am free. I am happy. I am able to show her all my sides. I know she will accept them all, because she is willing to demonstrate her duality of being, too. We are both bad and good together. We cruise down the road and my void flies out the open window, as we smoke cigarettes and talk about religion.

I have a captive audience, and I play my favorite songs for her and tell her why I love them. I am tired of telling myself, that was old and boring, but playing them who has never heard them before reawakens my senses and I am able to see what it was I loved about them.

In a way, Lara is like the friend I always wanted but never quite had, the Jack to my Neal. I have written so many entries in my real diary about my longing to have a friendship like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady's, but it didn't really happen. My friends either weren't creative enough or weren't passionate enough for me to have that aspect of a friendship that I craved: the sense of symbiotic creationism.

Lara and I are there, man. We are bouncing ideas off each other and running our sentences into each other's and it just flows between us. Unfortunately, at this point of our lives, we also have our own lives to lead and can't simply drop everything to spend all our time together. We would love to, of course, since we have so much fun and so much in common, and we make grand plans, "let's set aside during the week for creative time, for exercise time, for studying the Bible, for scrapbooking, for geocaching or hiking, for spending time with the dogs," but time is a precious commodity for both of us.

The importance, really, is the creative time, because that is THE thing, the Jack and Neal thing. I am the idea man and she is the creative force, the one who gets it done. I am running my mouth Neal-style and she says, "man, you really need a tape recorder, record some of the things you say" and I laugh at how I've heard that before, and geez what we would have done if Neal had been running a tape recorder when he was talking, only he was much faster, much wilder, much more alive than me, and here's Jack, aka Lara, figuring out how we are going to fit it all in.

And we ride down the highway, as I play my music for her, every now and then throwing in the naughty lesbian karoake version. We ramble on into the night with our spirituality and sensuality riding shotgun, and there is no room in this car for that void.

Presence