a weekend alone to ponder

he has travelled and I love him, fuck I love him

but. Yes, there is always one of those.

I feel guilty for saying this but I'm glad he's gone.

I never realized how much I liked living alone. No one to chide. No one to question. No one to wonder about. A freedom from worrying about people.

Anyone who knows me fairly well has noticed I like to take care of people. Some might say I have a insatiable urge to take care of people. A select few might have some psycho babble as to why.

I used to hate to be alone, probably because I needed to feel needed. My entire existence was contingent on someone else's feelings. If someone didn't like me, it might be the end of my world.

I guess I didn't realize that aspect of me has changed. I saw the effects of it, being less angry with people, feeling less fear of others, cutting off people who always needed me. I never imagined that my true angst was never being happy with being alone. I used to be guilty; who I am ignoring now? What friend have I not called in a while? How can I opt out of this Halloween party two years in a row? Now, I don't care. Very often the best days I have involve no humans at all. Except for television humans, who are in a different class of "people" from those you might "see" on your day off. After all, they don't demand your complete attention; just the television stations do.

Spending time alone feels like a long ago memory. The kind you might still retain that heavy physical memory of. Or as they say, "It's like riding a bike." As a kid, I loved to read. Some of my fondest memories are tied into books. In a house with four other people, people who were needy and wanted attention, reading was seen as anti-social behavior. But you know, not said that way, more like, "You always have your nose stuck in a book." And then the eye rolling, to let me know that wasn't as cool as I seemed to pretend it might be.

Once, since I've lived here with him, I read a book in his presence. It was the sort of book that demanded to be read, that lured as I walked past, that I did not resist. I wonder if he knows that he has his own versions of this, diluted so that his attentions can oscillate toward me after my repetition of the question. Lately, I've begun to enjoy our together/alone time. Sometimes we both sit here with laptops in each lap and something better to do, but we futz around, I play sudoku on my dashboard, he surfs the message boards of some geekboy review site. And we get to pretend that no one else needs us and no one is going to bother us. Maybe someday we will funnel our energies into something collaborative. For now, we are still feeling out the mine field and wondering where to step next.

Today it was the out of sight beauty routines women should avoid sharing with their mate. That whole face mask stuff. I mean, seriously do you think the goo on your face is cute? At all? Not so much. Plucking the eyebrows. Another thing that cannot be fun to watch. Hairs pulled. Pain. Ice. Numbness. Redness. Eww. Clipping your toenails. I still can hardly stand when he does it in front of me. I try not to do it when he's around because I hate that noise and imposing it one someone else seems horrrible. (Once I was on the bus and someone was clipping their nails. On the bus. Shudder.)

And I then I spent a long time zoning out to television that he would never let me watch, even though I watch tons of his dumb shit just because it's his tv and he's more pushy like it matters and I know they rerun my shows all the time and a week from now it'll be on again; hell half of the reruns I've seen already. In fact I avoided watching anything he would want to watch that I've become used to and half enjoy and watched horrible things instead, like: What Not To Wear, The Oprah Show, and recent emmy winner (they'll give any one emmy these days, won't they?) The Tyra Banks Show. I like to imagine I'm watching the part that will end up as a clip on The Soup. But I digress.

Sometimes I spend my days spinning like a top from person to person. Even when I wasn't dating him, there was that feeling. Sometimes I forget to slow down, I forget to let my limbs out, and then I lose myself in trying to keep everyone else in focus while I spin. So here's to stretching out in the bed, taking up the couch, and leaving my stuff laying all around. In a few days he'll come back to a refreshed me. Then I'll be glad he's back.