Then, it was midday, and the sky was a light shade of blue. I sat on a metal bench in front of the long gray brick hall, the light hurting my eyes. People trickled in and out of the gray building. Behind me were rectangles of gardens where, again, a few people walked here and there in groups. It was a country estate somewhere outside of London. I was in shorts and it was warm, and I carried a copy of Carson McCuller’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” with me, picked up recently in a used bookstore, which I tried to read off and on during the day, but could not get into.

There was also the time I sat alone is the rolling tin can- a passenger car on a Czech train that rolled from Germany to Prague. The car was empty and immensely gray, empty of placards and ads. Just the muted cla-clank cla-clank of leaving the West behind, and an awareness of leaving behind everything familiar.

The end of the semester, and the doors of dorm rooms, usually shut and holding in the blare of music or TV shows or raucous conversations, open, betraying the empty spaces. The long quiet halls, bare of movement.

Sitting in the near middle of a near middle row in a lecture hall the first day of class.

Cleaned up, in suit and tie, after the photos and the drives and dinners, under the swirling lights and the din of all the others talking, at every high school formal I attended.

In adolescence, the first night of every Disciple Now weekend put on by our church, when 10-12 kids holed up in a host home for the weekend, and there were alpha males and pretty girls and kids coupling, and I was confused and intimidated and invisible and unimportant.

Day after day, walking street after street in Chicago, living on a few dollars each week, window shopping and watching at people coming and going into stores and restaurants and walkups and high rise buildings, 1300 miles from friends and family, after the marriage failure.

Laying in our apartment, back to back with her, after I scuttled the wedding, and then we, to everyone’s later alarm and dismay, went to the justice of the peace, and I thought “What did I do” and she was asleep and we were leaving for the planned honeymoon the next day and the moon was God’s large pupil peering in the window at me and my heart was aching.

And laying by her in the quiet of the morning in the rustic room in the lodge outside of Banff, stiff in anxiety and fear and shame.

My whole freshman year of high school.

Disembarking from a bus in the center of a downtown Dublin neighborhood onto an empty street under drizzly gray skies.

On-call after visiting hours in a sleep room, waiting anxiously for the pager to go off for a chaplain visit to a patient or family somewhere in a dark room in the Houston hospital.

Sitting in a bare room in the upscale hostel in a northeast London suburb, knowing I would be heading back to the states the next day.

Years 28-33, to a large extent.

Each day after my brother’s several departures from Albuquerque to his next station in life away, out there, away from me and New Mexico and home

These have been some of the deepest, loneliest moments of my life.

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Photo Credit: “Tube” by Sarah Price via Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license.