David McElroy

I didn’t get to sleep Friday night until the sun was coming up Saturday morning around 6:30 a.m.

I’m not quite sure what I was doing all night, but this has become a pattern for me lately. I spent some of the time reading. I watched a movie. And I spent quite awhile at this little gazebo about half a mile from my house. It’s at the center of the little downtown area of the suburb where I live. While the rest of the city is asleep, it’s a good place for me to write.

I’m back there again Saturday night, but it’s hard to be sure why I’m here. I feel the need to write, but I also feel a creeping frustration that doesn’t have a name. Part of me wants to hide and be alone, and another part of me wants to desperately reach out to someone. I feel so conflicted — like someone who is screaming like a mad man on the inside but looks perfectly calm on the outside.

I feel as though I’ve lost control over my life — and these late-night times of solitude seem to be the only times when things make any sense.

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I no longer recognize the person I was when I was 25 years old.

I don’t quite know who I was. I was managing editor of a small daily newspaper. I was good at my job. I was brash. Ambitious. Arrogant. I knew it all. I was going to change the world.

And that precocious and baby-faced man was married, too.

I rarely mention having been married back then, although I wrote about it here a couple of years ago. In fact, I rarely think about it. That’s a part of my life that feels completely foreign to me now. It’s almost as though it never happened.

Even though she and I have been divorced for years now, I still have the highest regard for the woman I married back then. We still have friendly correspondence every now and then. I’m very happy that she married a man who seems perfect for her. They have a fine son and they’re both college journalism professors.

When we married, I thought she was my soulmate. I thought our marriage was for life. So what happened? Was I wrong to think we were soulmates? Or was it something else?

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How many friends do you have? Do you have any idea anymore? Or do you even know what the word “friend” means now?

I ran across a discussion earlier today among funeral directors about how many people typically attend funerals. Although they all knew of some large and showy funerals, most were more familiar with the ones at which few people showed up.

One guy said that 10 to 15 people was typical for him. Another thought it might be closer to 40. But the numbers were shockingly small, except in cases of large, close-knit families with a lot of local relatives.

How many Facebook “friends” do you have? It’s bothered me for years that the folks at the company use that word, because their idea of friends is very different than mine. At one point, I had 5,000 Facebook “friends” — which is the limit for a personal account — and even after aggressively deleting and blocking people for years, I still have about 500.

But how many of those people are really my friends? How many would show up at my funeral?

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