The days were growing long, and I was growing older.  It was obvious that something was absent from my life.   At 53 years of age, it was seemingly becoming difficult to discover things that interested me, and drive me through the day.  Nothing was as spontaneous as it used to be in my earlier years.  A hole was missing in my heart.  Some cavity of emptiness was starting to take a toll on my life, and it needed to be filled soon.  I couldn’t figure out why I was beginning to feel this way, or what it was about.
I would spend my monotonous days alone, doing everything by myself.  Working, running to the grocery store afterward, and cooking dinner for myself are just a few of the pedestrian activities that were I became accustomed to doing alone.  I suppose it could be that I worked myself into a casual routine instead of mixing my agenda up every once in awhile.  However, for some reason, I don’t believe that that is what was truly bugging me day in and day out.  Something deeper was the problem.  Then it dawned on me that it wasn’t that my schedule had become so pedestrian, but rather the fact that what I was doing with my life - grocery shopping, cooking, watching television at night - was alone.  After leaving my hometown of Charleston, where my family lived only 10 minutes away from me, I had no one to spend my days with, let alone talk to.  I never spoke with anyone at work, except for this one lady.  She was the only one that would go out of her way to talk to me.  Shyness kept me from building conversations with co-workers; however, if it was someone that began talking to me, it was easier to be myself and carry a conversation through. 
It felt as though this gloomy period of my life would be stuck with me until death; all until the day I worked up the nerves to talk to Cynthia, the lady at work that never minded going out of her way to speak with me.  I saw her out of the corner of my eye, walking passed the door to my office, and hurried to call her into the room to have a word with her.  We spoke as if we were truly friends, and the closer I feel to a person the more comfortable I am concoursing with that person.  As the weeks passed, we engaged in conversation more and more.  While my agenda remained pedestrian, my attitude toward waking up everyday slowly began to emerge out from an abyssal trench.
Something about Cynthia encouraged me to wake up every morning and go to work.  I suppose I was looking forward to having a buddy I could talk to and grow closer to.  One thing was for sure, however: if there was an answer to why my heart was cringed with loneliness, I’d find it in her.