And Yet.

I have been living alone for four months now. My son moved away — five and a half hours away — and I have been figuring out, quietly, what that means.

On paper, my life looks full. And it genuinely is. And yet.

I am not sure what “down” feels like. Not really. Because I am busy with work that fills over 40 hours of my week, teaches me new skills every day, and trains me for things I never thought I would be trained to do.

I am busy with Bruce the dachshund and three cats in this little house, driving me quietly crazy with their mischief — pestering me, knocking things over, reminding me at all hours that I am not, technically, alone.

I am busy learning new skills in my free time, because I decided to and because I can. I am busy reading, listening to books and podcasts. Walking every day. Hiking once or twice a week. Knitting. Cooking. Baking bread, apparently.

I am busy planning a long trip and three months off in September — something that fills me with equal parts excitement and disbelief that I am actually doing it.

I am busy talking to three of my best friends almost every day. I go to the hot tub once a day. I am, by any reasonable measure, living a full and intentional life.

And still. Deep inside, in the quiet gaps between all of it — there is an emptiness I cannot quite name.

Just as I started writing this post, I found out it has a name after all: empty nest grief. But that phrase doesn’t quite cover it — not for someone who already knows grief well. This is different. Subtler. More disorienting precisely because everything else is so genuinely good.

It is the particular ache of a home that used to hold someone you love. The absence not of a bad life, but of a specific presence. The silence that no hot tub, no podcast, no purring cat — however persistent — can fully fill.

I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure I’m looking for one. But I suspect I’m not the only one sitting in a full life, wondering why there’s still a quiet hollow somewhere in the middle of it.

Are you?