There's Nobody Here

(Actually wrote this a few months ago...but never posted it. 

J-dub left for Shanghai again this morning...and it mostly still applies. Except it's fall now.)

I’m the loneliest girl in the world.  No, really.

Okay.  Not really.  But I’m PRETTY lonely. 

But how can this be?

I lived alone for four of the six years before I got married.  I KNEW how to live alone. And what’s more…I liked it. Not that I didn’t love the roommates I had when I didn’t live alone, ‘cause I did love them.  I still love them. But I also loved living alone.  In my very own apartment.  With my very own front door.  And my very own refrigerator.  And my very own everything. Knowing that the whole place was the way it was because I alone had caused it to be that way.  Having every speck of floor space and air space to do with it whatever I pleased.

The Hubs left for Shanghai this morning.  From Shanghai, he will go to Tokyo.  And I won’t see him again until the end of next week.

This is a short trip compared to his last one, which lasted over 2 weeks.  But he hasn’t even been gone 24 hours yet and I’m already going crazy. I’ve been married now just over four months.  Four months! I lived totally and completely alone for FOUR YEARS.  Have I really forgotten how to be alone so quickly??  And I only spend an average of three and a half hours a day with the boy anyway (awake, that is…).

So I find myself needing to do a little self-evaluation to see if I can identify the reasons I might be suddenly feeling THIS lonely. And the results are in:

1- It’s summer, which means it’s spider season.  And in Australia, the spiders are the size of my hand.  And I spotted one in our building yesterday.  And I just KNOW there’s one lurking somewhere in our apartment.  And if it shows itself sometime before next Thursday, I will have to deal with it. Alone.

2- I have no access to American television.  No Fox News to fill the void.  No Candice Olson or Ina Garten or Glenn Beck to keep me company.

3- My family and 99.9% of my friends live approximately 8,000 miles away.  I can’t imagine how far away that would actually feel if it weren’t for g-chat and skype.

4- It’s raining.  Hard.  And rain always makes me lonely.  Even when I’m not alone.
5- While I used to love living alone, that was before I had ever lived with a boy, which I always suspected I would rather like. Now I live with a boy. Which I do rather like.

And now I feel better. ‘Cause it turns out that I’m not such a miserable failure at being alone, after all.  It’s just that being alone has gotten lonelier. 

But mostly, I just miss The Hubs.