I’ve been cleaning a lot lately. Well, I cleaned the tub twice in two weeks, which is a lot for me. I’ve been doing laundry, including folding that shit and putting it away. I even vacuumed yesterday. I can count on one hand the number of times I vacuumed in my old apartment (my former roommate cleaned on a four-day-cycle). It’s weird and I don’t like it, this compulsion to clean things.
I’ve also been … emotional lately. I’m always full of feelings (much like Kristen Bell, if I’m not somewhere between a three and a seven on the emotional scale, I’m crying), but this week has been extra. And I don’t bleed, so fuck right off with your ‘that time of the month’ shit. Related: IUDs are fucking amazing.
Monday I came home in a mood. Nothing really accounted for it, but I was sour. Bogart was making us chili and I had friends coming over, so I should’ve been in good spirits. I wasn’t, and that pissed me off even more. B was cooking and playing his ‘music’ (I shit you not, one song was just some dude yelling LIFE IS SHORT DIARRHEA), so I busied my grumpy ass cleaning in the spare room. He could tell something was up, and asked a few times if I was okay. Mind you, he has seen me in not-particularly-pleasant states, but there have always been reasons. I told him I was annoyed, and not knowing why further annoyed me. ‘I’ve never seen you like this before,’ he told me. ‘I don’t like it.’ I snapped that it’s an uncomfortable state of being for me and I didn’t like it either, and we decided at that point wine would at least take the edge off.
By the end of the night I had consumed about a bottle of wine and two glasses of champagne, thanks to said friends (I also made ombré wine slushies, which looked better than they tasted). I have no recollection of saying goodbye, although I’m told I thanked them for coming to see my new apartment, changed to our apartment only when corrected by B. After they left I also apparently demanded we watch The Fall, fell asleep mid-episode, woke up to ask, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ about a main character, made B tuck me in, told him to snuggle me when he came to bed, and when he attempted to fulfill that request promptly said, ‘No go away.’ I am a fucking delight.
The rest of the week somewhat evened out, until I said goodbye to my side gig at a popular tech company. I’ve been juggling full and part-time work for over a year and a half now, and it’s just become too much. It was a tough decision, but work-life balance eventually won out. Cue my final day and a world of tears. From openly weeping at a morning meeting to being clapped out (thanks to a lovely coworker and friend telling me she would be livid if I left without that happening), a couple hundred confused people at the mall had the pleasure of seeing my cryface yesterday. I rallied and attended a lovely bachelorette dinner, randomly saw my friend’s wedding band at a bar near my apartment, and one of my best friends came over for late night drinks and a heart to heart.
Sunday morning, one of the few Bogart and I were able to wake up and spend together, I was full of pesky feelings again. This time it was closer to anxiety than annoyance—a slight tightening of the chest, the beginning of a knot in my stomach, and that troublesome tingle of impending tears. But try as I might, I could not figure out fucking why. So I went about my day, caught up with a friend, checked out my new hood a bit, and fucking cleaned some more. At least all these emotions are productive.
When I finally told a friend that something was wrong and I couldn’t figure out what, she hit the nail on the head so fast it almost took my breath away: She asked if I was lonely. Holy fuck. I am. It feels silly (understatement) as fuck, since I just moved in with the dudeface I love, yet here I am all sad panda because I’m lonely. For all this living together business, we actually spend precious little time together. He’s asleep when I get up early to go to work, and unless I wait up past midnight (which I often do), we won’t see each other that day. I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up to be a kitchen widow, and I was looking at moving into my own place before we decided to shack up, but I was still ill-prepared for the change of having a roommate who was generally home the same hours as me (despite giving each other lots of space) to moving in with someone with a completely opposite schedule.
Obviously I’m not expecting him to change jobs, but feelings are feelings despite how dumb they sound when you say them out loud. But I’m coming up with some solutions (my extroverted self requires lots of social interaction, which I’ll actually have time for since I left the side gig), and in the meantime we’ll have a very clean apartment. Plus, the cats are surprisingly good conversationalists and I do live across the street from a LCBO with a great wine selection.
Steph Not Stephanie 