So, the boy is out of town for 10 days. What are you going to do?

Do? What the hell? I'm going to do what I always do: take life one day at a time.

Just to keep it accurate, here are things I have done since he left on Saturday (from most recent to least):
• Arranged for the internment of Mom's ashes for September 10th.
• Read another chapter of The Aesthetic Brain
• Packed up and drove to FedEx my practically brand new Alienware 15, for Dell to hopefully fix the dimming issue on the screen
• Did a little diddling
• Set up appointments for dry needling for my stupid plantar fasciitis and others for the eventual invasion of my girly bits
• Baked a week's worth of fingerling potatoes to assist in weaning me off of grain-based carbs
• Experimented with a stromboli made with potatoes instead of dough...turned out delicious!
• Took myself to an art exhibit with fractals...was beautiful. If you focused on the ceiling, the wall to wall images felt like you were mooring through them on a room sized ship
• Went out to dinner with a female friend...it took me years to find and cultivate one (sigh)
• Watched the second to last episode of Sharp Objects....oh my ME!
• Went to all of 4 of my OrangeTheory workouts this week, like a good girl
• Had wine twice during the week, like a bad girl
• Fell into a K-Hole of 80's teen movies and inspirational vids from the 00's in a failed attempt to go to sleep

I list that just to prove to myself that I'm not THAT much of a loner chick, even though I know mostly am, these days. I also list it to prove, to myself at least, that I didn't want for things to do just because my partner is out of the house for a while.

When we're apart for a while, people ask if we talk a lot on the phone. We don't. We don't even really text all that much. I had hear a comedian recently reflect that it's hard to have much to talk about when you come home at night when you've literally been able to follow each other's movements all day long through social media.

All these years, I thought I wanted a romantic. Turns out what I needed was a partial Luddite. When I knew I wasn't being pursued through my social media, it reinforced that I never really like charting my day there anyway, and now I had even one less reason to bother.

While I have been back in circulation here lately, I can't help but look back which, of course, brings back past romantic entanglements. Both in my own writing and in those of others, I am over saturated in sap; we really laid it on thick back in the day. Maybe it was just because we were young(er), because we were using this medium to mediate our feelings for one another. What I realized is that, while romance might be the way I would initially get snagged or snag a fellah, it's rarely the way we keep each other satisfied.

Does that mean that there is no more romance? Well, in this relationship, there wasn't really that much to begin with. We're not a couple to hold hands in public. We're more apt to grope one another when were just trying to brush our damn teeth. We'll never get married or have kids, but we'll likely buy a house together someday. Romance these days is just thinly veiled realism wrapped around with thoughtfulness. My guy is the kind of guy that will top off the gas when he borrows my car, or always pick up a bottle of wine I like when he's out getting groceries. He'll indulge me, but he'll also tell me no, he's not ready to talk about that, no, I'm too tired to discuss it, no, I don't want to go to this or that thing.

At 42, I am realizing the benefits of realism over romance. It will come in handy when I have to have my uterine fibroids starved of blood so they'll freaking shrink and die already! It will come in handy when I'm putting the box of my mother's ashes in the ground. It has served me well when he tells me the truth, that that outfit is not flattering or that I've put on weight, but I find you sexy anyways.



Although they never married, their relationship outlasted all the marriages on their block.---King Missile, Gary and Melissa


That's kind of how I want us to end up, to outlive romance. Not to forget what it is or recognize it, but to evolve past it.

I'm beginning to think that this is one way to view partnership. And I dig it.