Friday nights...

There’s just something more difficult about Friday nights. The rest of the week is a blur of rushing around, getting things done, being places where I need to be, seeing the people who are available to be seen, doing the admin, keeping up with the extra-murals, but Fridays… Fridays there’s no urgency, no necessity, nowhere to be, nothing that has to be done.

I end the crazy work week on the high of: “It’s Friday!”, then get home and it’s empty. I leave home to go and get some groceries. When I return; the emptiness is still hanging there, lingering to rub in that its essence is still around my home. I turn the radio on and the sound is annoying, it doesn’t fill the empty space, it echoes it, amplifies it, magnifies it to proportions that I just don’t need. There’s no-one to comment with, no-one to sing with, or dance with, no-one else listening. The radio goes off, so wonderful that the DJ has such a fabulous evening ahead.

The emptiness circles me and I try to make plans to get out. I end up with nothing for the evening, but more plans that will fill my already busy week ahead. I look up from my phone and see the emptiness. It’s become tangible. It’s almost a fully grown character of its own called: Absence. Absence of another’s breath. Absence of another’s thoughts. Absence of appreciation. Absence of a being to affirm my existence. A character that has to be obese for all the space it takes up.

Out the door again, got to get out. Exercise. An extra long session of exercise with my headphones in my ears. Volume up. Work it out. Is it even possible to work it out? Artists pass through my ears. I try to work through it, work it out with the energy being fed into my system through the vibrations reverberating off the membranes in my ears…

I pop in to visit someone older, someone without visitors. I fill their emptiness. Use them to avoid my own. That only lasts for so long. Then back to the home space, the space housing the rooms that only have me to fill them. I potter around cooking, eating, cleaning, listening to my headphones, dodging the emptiness by focusing on anything else that is visible, automatic, systematic. I’m trying to face off the space around me which remains unused and empty until I step into it. There is no-one else to help me fill it. No-one else to help me use the space and so what is unused must remain empty all around me. There is more empty than there is me to fill it. More chores, more things to try fill it. Futility.

I sing at the top of my lungs letting my voice fill what my body can’t. It works. In its own way. It helps me feel like it’s all ok. It helps me focus on strangers from foreign lands whose voices are intimately held by my ears. The only attention I will receive this eve: that of strangers letting me know that they have loved, they have known happy, they ask me if “I wanna dance under the moonlight”, yet they also know that “a good heart is hard to find” and that there’s a risk of getting hurt, that “it’s Friday night and I’m going nowhere” and that my father told me that “Heaven’s got a plan for me”… they sing, I latch on like a newborn to her mother’s breast milk. I latch on to the intravenous lifeline that fills what I can’t, that offers me the illusion of another’s presence, when, in truth, there is no-one but me, in the empty.

Yes, Friday nights are just more difficult than other nights.