Dreadful Nonsense: I don't know about you, but I've been drinking

I don't know about you, but I've been drinking

We've been together over three years now, and have been living together for over two and a half of those years. We've managed to pretend to like an awful lot of things that the other person likes, and therefore we spent much of our free time - the time not spent locked in an office forced to be polite to rich people for money - together. Sometimes I go to the gym, sometimes he goes to watch football matches, once a week I go to talk to suicidal people and he spends his time breaking and fixing my computer and laptop, but almost every evening we spent the vast majority of our time together: me invading his personal space and messing with his hair, him singing songs that he makes up on the spot about whatever he can see and telling me to stop touching him with my cold, cold hands.

Tonight, he is out with his male friends, having their Annual Gentlemen's Christmas Dinner, an event to which wives and girlfriends are explicitly omitted. I have spent most of this afternoon asking him what I should do.

I don't know, he keeps responding, do whatever you want to do.

Oh, that's fine for him to say - what I want to do is annoy him by messing with his hair and creeping up to him when he's not expecting it and putting my icy cold hands directly onto his kidney so he screams with the pain and shock of it. What I want to do is ask him the same question over and over until he leaves the room shaking his head. What I want to do is stare at him when he's trying to read a book because I know that puts him off. What I want to do is ask him to tell me about things like war and planes and military strategy and then have a lovely nap while he goes into unnecessary historical detail. What I don't want to do is have to entertain myself.

I've documented this already on this side, but damn you all to Hades, I'm going to document it again: I've lost the ability to entertain myself. When you live with someone who is literally paid to entertain the nation, you forget to flex the muscles that allow you to come up with your own amusement. I mean, why go out for something when you've got something better at home, as the meat-based, misogynistic expression doesn't go. And now that he's not here to irritate or to get me things when I ask him to in that whiny voice that I have, I don't know what to do.

I've got a list as large as my own arms of what I could be doing: writing an essay on person-centered counselling, for a kick off, or cleaning the bathroom, watching the french film my friend gave me for my birthday or finally finishing the book by Dave Eggers that I started reading in August. I could be answering the first of the questions on the genetics course that I've singularly failed to keep up with, or I could be cleaning up the kitchen cupboards. Scrubbing down the bath that the plumber has left filled with muddy footprints. Staring at the Christmas decorations. Sleeping. I could be doing all of these things. And yet. I'm basically just sitting about, at a loss.

It's so strange to reflect on the fact that, three and a half years ago, I didn't think that my life was missing anything. I didn't feel a gap that needed filling or any kind of urge to run out and find me a life partner, and yet now that I've got someone that looks like he may well fill that role, I don't know what I ever did without him and his ridiculously brilliant hair or his stupid songs or his irritating habit of pairing up his socks when he puts them into the wash basket, or the way he manages to literally flood the bathroom just by washing his face. I didn't have these things before, and I didn't think I needed them, but now that I've been left without them for one evening, I don't know what to do.

This entry was posted on 08 December 2007 at 9:18 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

I don't know about you, but I've been drinking

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