My friends live in that box.

Maybe it’s hormonal, or maybe it’s stress, or maybe I don’t need a reason, but I’ve been lonely lately. Some of those reading this that I’m closer to know the whole story, and I’m not going to go into it in public. My relationship with my husband is secure, so before you worry, I don’t mean lonely in that sense. I could just use a buddy.

I was explaining some things to Louie and we were discussing money, along with ways to cut back on expenses. One of the first things to come up was internet. Now, our phone is tied into our internet (Vonage) so cutting it off isn’t an option. A cheaper ISP would be nice but since we live ‘in the sticks’, we’re not overflowing with options. As a part of the conversation, he said it wouldn’t matter to him if he didn’t have internet.

I explained to him that yes, I can live without internet. I just don’t want to.

I love my home. I love how peaceful the town is. I love that I can hear crickets chirping when I literally live in the center of town. This is gross, but I even love that we can smell the pig poop from the farm down the road. It’s not that I love the smell of poop, but I love knowing how close to being rural we are. There’s very little traffic. There’s a park across the street. The schools are amazing. This is exactly where I want to raise my family, because of all of these things. However, with the exception of one person, I have no friends here. That friend messed up her back while bowling with her kids and she hasn’t been leaving her house. I honestly don’t have any desire to make friends with anyone else here. They’re all either much older than me, way too different in their parenting (to the point that I’d call them bad parents because they let their kids run wild and they just don’t seem to care), or they flaunt their wealth. The woman that bought her 11 year old a Lexus because it was on sale comes to mind. I wouldn’t care what she did with her money, but everything out of her mouth is a one-up of something someone else says, and I just don’t care to be something she steps on to raise her self-esteem.

I don’t mind giving up on the possibility of new friendships close to my home for the sake of my family, but I need to have contact with the outside world somehow. As I said, I’ve been extremely lonely. I do have a couple of friends in the town where I grew up, which is only about 30 miles from here, but most of my friends from there are off doing their own thing and we’ve drifted apart (and this is where we get into the private part of the story).

So I know to someone like my husband that spends his limited amount of time on the internet looking up woodworking, the idea of a friendship with someone you’ve never met or very rarely see is foreign. It may even sound pathetic. To some people, the idea of 150+ people that are essentially pen pals and the anecdotes about the things happening in their lives is probably pretty silly.

Until you’ve jumped headfirst into the online world, you won’t understand.

My friends are there to offer me hugs when I have a bad day. They support me when I lose a loved one. They offer advice when I’m mad. They cheer when I’m glad. They might not be here in the literal sense, but they’re here for me. There’s a great chance that some of us may never meet, or if we do it’ll only happen once but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt their love. There’s also those that are almost local but not close enough to just hang out with, but when I announce tragedy, my texts are chirping on my cell phone, because they care. I’m truly loved, and I’ve had the blessed opportunity to love back.

I wait up and pace the floor in anticipation of babies I’ll never meet in real life. I scour photos of weddings that I couldn’t go to. I welcome home military husbands when their home is across the country. I offer support during tragedies. I giggle at passive-aggressive acts toward mean mothers-in-law that I don’t know. I cry when there’s loss. I laugh when there’s joy. It may only be bits of ram to someone else, I realize. My computer has an off button, but at the end of the day when I use that button, you’re all still in my head and in my heart.

Thank you for being here and for caring. I love you all, and no matter how lonely I get, I don’t discount you.