She Had Everything She Was Supposed to Want

Walk into her kitchen and you'll feel it immediately.

Everything has its place. Counters clear. The window above the sink pulls the morning light straight through it…counters bare, everything still.. On the shelf above the coffee maker, a collection of ceramic chickens ... different sizes, different glazes, some with little painted flowers, one wearing what appears to be a very serious expression. She's been collecting them for years. They were a beloved gift. There’s a sweet back story.

More than likely something delicious and aromatic is baking in the oven.

Not for her. For the neighbors, for the woman at church who just had a procedure, for the new couple two doors down she hasn't officially met yet, but will, bearing a loaf of something warm wrapped in a dish towel she won't ask to have returned.

She is generous in an unthinking way. The way that doesn't calculate. The way that has become so natural, it doesn't feel like a choice anymore, just a reflex, just who she is.

Everyone will tell you the same thing about her.

She is the happiest person. Always upbeat. Funny in that quick, warm way where the joke lands before you even see it coming. She makes people feel at ease just by being in the room. She has done this her whole life, and she is genuinely good at it, and she would never in a million years call it exhausting.

Except sometimes, late, she goes to her bedroom.

And that is where everything changes.

Her bedroom is her happy place. This is where she spends her money, where she makes no apologies, where the woman who gives everything away keeps something for herself. The sheets have a thread count she researched. The comforter is the kind of weight that feels like warm liquid gold washing over her skin. The pillows are arranged in a specific order that matters to her in a way she couldn't fully explain but would notice immediately if someone disturbed.

She gets into that bed and something in her exhales.

She didn't know she'd been holding it.

She has a good life. She would tell you that and mean it. A home she loves, people who love her, enough, more than enough, more than a lot of people have, and she knows it and is grateful, genuinely grateful, not the pretend kind.

And still.

There is something she hasn't said out loud. Maybe not even to herself, not in words, not clearly. It lives more in the body than the mind. In that exhale when the bedroom door closes. In the way the smile takes just a fraction of a second longer to arrive some mornings. In the thing that surfaces occasionally in the space between waking and being fully awake, before the day gets loud enough to cover it.

Something is missing.

She can feel it, but doesn’t yet understand it. She is not falling apart. She would be almost offended by that description because she is fine; she is genuinely mostly fine.

But fine is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

She has built a life around being needed and being light and making things beautiful and giving things away. She is good at all of it. She has been good at all of it for so long that she has almost completely forgotten to ask what she is building it for.

What does she want? Not for her neighbors, not for her family, not for the new couple two doors down.

For her.

The ceramic chickens can't answer that. The spotless window can't answer it. Even the perfect bed, the one place in the whole house that is entirely hers, can only hold her while she figures it out.

Here is what I know about this woman.

She is not shallow. She is not unaware. She is not someone who has never thought about the deeper things.

She is someone who got very very good at a particular way of moving through the world and never stopped to ask whether that way was actually taking her somewhere she wanted to go.

That question, the real one, the one underneath all the baking and the chickens and the gorgeous bed and the laugh that fills a room, is still waiting for her.

It is not going anywhere.

And neither, I suspect, is she. Not until she finally decides to answer it.

The good news is that deciding is always available.

Even now. Even her.

Even you, if any part of this felt uncomfortably familiar.

Love is ALL there is.

Diana