EPILOGUE | The Empty Chair

EPILOGUE

The Empty Chair

Somewhere tonight a man is sitting in a room full of people and feeling alone.

Not alone like nobody’s there. Alone like everybody’s there and none of them know him. His kids are on their screens. His wife is in the next room. The TV is on. The house is full and the man is empty and he cannot figure out why, because by every metric the culture gave him, he’s doing fine. He has the job. He has the truck. He has the hobbies. He has the Saturday ritual and the fantasy roster and the group chat that lights up during the fourth quarter.

He has everything except the thing he traded for all of it.

Somewhere else tonight, a woman is lying awake next to a man who came home three hours ago but hasn’t arrived yet. She knows the difference. She learned it years ago. She stopped mentioning it because mentioning it became another fight, and the fights became a pattern, and the pattern became the marriage. She doesn’t want to leave. She wants him to come back. But she’s running out of language for a request she shouldn’t have to make.

Come home. Not to the house. To me.

Somewhere else tonight, a kid is at the dinner table talking about something that happened at school. Something small. Something that won’t matter in a month. But it matters right now, tonight, at this table, because this is the age where they still offer these things freely—before adolescence teaches them to stop volunteering and start performing. The window is open. It is open right now. And the chair across from them is empty. Or worse—occupied by a body whose eyes are somewhere else.

The kid finishes the story. Nobody responds. The kid learns.

The kid always learns.

This is not a guilt trip. Guilt is cheap and it fades by morning. This is arithmetic.

You get a finite number of evenings. A finite number of Saturdays. A finite number of school-year dinners before the kid leaves and the table gets quieter in a way that cannot be reversed. You do not get to bank them. You do not get to pause them. You do not get to make a withdrawal later from an account you never funded.

The chair is either full or it isn’t. You are either there or you aren’t. And “there” does not mean in the building. It means in the conversation. In the mess. In the ordinary, unspectacular, nobody-is-watching rhythm of a life shared with people who need you to be more than a provider and less than a hero. They need you to be present. That’s all. That’s everything.

Fill the chair.

Stay in the room.

Come home.

“Your ‘me time’ should be spent sharpening your ‘we time.’”

END

• F. Tronboll III