Arriving home alone has a pain all of its own. Everything feels wrong. How can anything feel right when the one you love isn’t with you any more? You can’t hear their voice; can’t hear their footsteps any more; can’t feel their arms around you. Nothing makes sense. It feels as though “normal” was when you were together – and this is just “not right.” There’s an empty feeling – almost as if someone just died – or, maybe, as if you just lost a part of yourself.

Sometimes it takes a long time to stop crying.

So, people have asked “What’s the cure for this feeling? How can we stop feeling so horrible after we’ve said goodbye?” We’ve never found the cure for it. Actually, we’re not sure we’d want to. Missing someone so desperately is a sign that you’ve found something very special. Imagine coming home after a visit, or an airport goodbye, and not caring that your loved one wasn’t there any more. Wouldn’t that be more worrying? It would certainly make life easier, but it wouldn’t do anything to show how much you need to be together. We thought of that pain – that emptiness – as a reminder that we belonged together, and that nothing would feel right until we were in the same place again.

After we said goodbye, we always allowed ourselves a bit of time just to be miserable, because we needed that. The first time we were back together on Skype was always difficult. Carla would usually be crying, saying things like, “I just need you to be here! You need to come back!”… and Larry couldn’t do anything to help, usually because he had to go back to work the next day, and didn’t have enough vacation time, or money, to fly 5,347 miles and back every couple of weeks. Besides that, he felt exactly the same way. He was in the wrong place too… and missing the feeling of being together.