"Can I ask you a question?" I feel like a high schooler. I swear this was supposed to be easy but now I'm stammering with my vowels and consonants. "ahahah-uhuhuhohoho…"
"Sure, whatsup?" Sure, she's confident. It's like she owns the place. Well, maybe not, but she owns the moment. That much is true. Somebody else owns my dried swollen tongue.
"I…Uhm…" Yeah, I'm smooth. She's the only person I can talk to locally and I'm fumbling for words. Great.
Her smile is bright, her eyes are questioning moons. I don't know what she's expecting, but I can tell that when the words launch from my mouth, their combined phrasing landed unexpectedly.
"I'm taking a vacation in a couple of months. Where should I go?"
"I…Uhm…" Oh yeah! Now she's speaking my language!
That's not really my question, but that's really what I asked. Oh, I'm not trying to date my barista. She's cute and friendly, but she's too young; She's still in college. She hasn't seen what the real world will do to you outside the daily grind. Give her time. I know that one of the things it'll do is make a guy come out of his house on a Monday afternoon hoping to talk to somebody, even if it's for $3.50 for the first cup of conversation.
Now I know I've picked up a few new readers. Let me help you catch up with our story so far.
Hi, I'm Rob. I'm divorced. I'll be your crazy blogger for the next few minutes, or at least until you hit the back-page but--Ah, there you go. Everybody wave goodbye!
Anyway. I've been "divorced" for almost a month, but MyEx left over a year and a half ago. I work at home, and my job keeps me on a short nylon tether. The tether doesn't matter too much, because before MyEx left, she was my social life; I'm used to a social shock collar. It might have helped if she was more social I guess, but she wasn't so now I spend my social life at home. Oh, my dog says "Hi!"
Oh, don't feel sorry for me, I do that enough for both of us. I promise you, I get more than my RDA of self pity. My last doctors visit, he informed me I had a healthy dose of self doubt. I told him if he needed some, I had cases full of mason jars brimming with the stuff in the cupboard next to the peaches. I could spare whatever he needed. I wouldn't run out anytime soon.
"No, you won't be doing that, that's for sure…" he agreed and offered me a smiley lollipop.
So I work. I live at home and I try to get out. Well, scratch "try," I need to get out. If I don't, I start feeling like a caged animal in an abandoned zoo. It's so easy to do too. And if I miss it, the loneliness crashes down on me like a tsunami.
I spent the last two weeks alone.
Oops. What's that rushing sound?
The last 2 weeks passed and I limited myself to my usual coffee excursion. I was too busy and I didn't even make it to church. Last Saturday I tried to get out and enjoy dinner and a movie, but it was too late. I needed an adrenaline shot to the heart, and being alone in a crowd was just a splash in the face with tepid water.
And what kind of word is tepid, and what is it doing in my face? Dripping. That's what it's doing, but nothing else. I enjoyed the dinner. I enjoyed the movie. I wasn't real keen about being alone. I went to buy groceries, but halfway through the supermarket I thought, "Mmmm…Cheese, crackers, and wine sounds really good." That thought was closely followed by "Oh, but I'd be eating them alone. Well that sucks."
FWOOM!
Splash!
"Brad, tsunami aisle 5, tsunami aisle 5. We need a clean up."
Yeah it hit hard. What's more I'm a guy. We don't reach out, as Martian John Gray will tell you, we go hide in our cave, and we just expect you to know. What they don't tell you about the cave though, is it's a lonely dark place. For me, the hardest thing about being isolated is that when I feel isolated I need to prove myself right.
"Hi"
"Don't talk to me, I'm feeling alone."
"uhm…ok…"
"No I mean it. You're in my space. Go away."
Because how can I bundle up the burlap sack of self pity and start beating myself with a steel pipe if people are watching?
"Oh that? It's just laundry. I'm agitating."
When this happens all I can do is ride it out. I curl into a fetal ball, and let the waters crash around me--alone and isolated, because that's how I've planned it.
I guess the good news is that I don't need to rely on anybody to recover. When the waves ebb out, I get up, grab a towel and dry off. I look around and say, "See, I survived," and it's business as usual. You think I'd learn, but like Yogi, this seems to be my favorite pic-nic basket.
On the bright side, this is something exclusively my own, and not something I can blame on MyEx. See, now that she's gone and I've put away her baggage, I found my flotsam and jetsam baggage floats around me, marking my space. It's everywhere, and every piece has my name on it. See, that's one thing you assured to keep after the divorce: your baggage. Now that I'm done dealing with ours, I get to deal with mine. That's ok, I've got plenty of time to sort through it alone.
So the water shifts the sand under my toes and I'm looking at all this junk. I told somebody recently that people withdraw all the time. It's kind of a self defense mechanism. I said that the real friends were the people who stood still when you pulled away; that way you knew where to find them when you came back. So let me say "thank you," to all of you still standing outside my cave. I still wonder what I'm doing about my vacation...
"I don't know," She said, "I haven't been anywhere outside of the state. I hate to travel alone."
Yup, and it looks like I've got plenty of company when it comes to being alone.
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