Twenty-Seven

The weight of the endless days spent alone are starting to crush me again. I do well on the weekends when A is home, and we're together, and I have a purpose for being alive and out of bed and dressed. I have energy and goals and I am happy when he is with me. During the week, while I sit in the house for a mind-numbing 12-14 solitary hours, I feel cursed. Why do people wish they could stay at home all day long? I don't get that. It sucks, and daytime TV is worse than death. I've been through this before, when I was married to X and I wasn't working, and he worked on the road all week long. Then it was days and nights alone, week after week. I was in a new and strange city then, stuck in a small apartment with a very large and very needy dog. At the time, I was in my twenties and a very very different person, very meek with NO self-confidence at all. I was even petrified to drive anywhere because I didn't know where I was going in the unfamiliar town, so I stayed huddled up inside the apartment for months on end. I am not that person anymore, at least I'm not afraid of jumping in my car and just driving to wherever, I'm not afraid to turn down a wrong street or take a new road. Even if I am not going to any place in particular. But the only things I ever do when I leave the house are go shopping or go eat, and I don't need to do either. So I stay here at the house, wandering around like an empty shell waiting for A to come home and fill me up and bring me back to life. I am supposed to be at yoga right now, the classes that A is paying for me to take so I can start to feel better and have a reason to get out of the house. But I don't feel like it today, at least mentally. But I will probably lie to him and tell him I went to class, to make himself feel better about leaving me alone for so long every day. I've been with A for almost seven years now, and we used to work together for all of those years except for the last few months since we moved. I know how busy he is at work, and he made it perfectly clear to me in the beginning that he was dedicated to his career and that I had to accept that about him if I wanted to share his life. On the surface, I do, and I never complain when he has to work late or go in on the weekend, or take phone calls while we're eating dinner or on vacation, or when he has to go out of town for a whole week on business- rare, but it's happened a handful of times during our marriage. One night this week he got a call from work, the fire alarm was going off in the warehouse, right as I was putting dinner on the table. He said to start without him, he had to make a few calls, to handle the situation. I sat and ate alone while he was in his home office, and I was done eating and in the living room watching TV, before he ever got back to the table. That was like a hot knife in my heart, to sit there and eat dinner all alone, but I have to be a supportive spouse and accept moments like that. I try to see how fortunate we are, that he has a stable career and makes enough money so that I am not forced to take just any job I can find in order for us to survive. I am not forced to take any job at all. I am trying to find the good in all of this time I have on my hands, but all I can see is my loneliness and isolation here on this quiet dead end street out in the country. Every day I wake up and say I will do better, I will find something to go and do for the day, I will spend the day down in the basement sorting through unpacked boxes, I will go up to my studio and paint. I will stick to my diet, I will exercise, I will clean the house, I will call my parents or old friends. And after breakfast is finished and A leaves for work, I slump like a big fat dog turd at the table and the self-pity sets in. I don't know why, I don't know where it comes from, and I am sick as hell of feeling this way. I live a charmed life- no job, no children, no bills, no worries- and I am free to pursue whatever it is I would like. But by myself. Does it really matter if I am just sitting at home, or out roaming the city streets, if I am alone either way? Would it help to wander the aisles at Barnes & Noble or Target, if I am by myself? Am I not just as lonely, even out in public? Sometimes writing this blog helps me, when I can pound out my frustrations on the keyboard and let it all out. Sometimes writing here makes me feel even worse, because I read over all my faults and flaws and ridiculous whining when I have no reason to whine. No reason! But I do it nonetheless.