Yes, I'm still alive ... tired, depressed, but alive

Sometimes it takes me a while to look at the calendar and realize how much time has gone by. Then I get an e-mail like the one this morning from a reader who asked,

Hi, H - are you alive? functioning?

Which tells me it has been a while since I posted.

So yes, I'm alive. I can probably even claim "functioning" although that point is more arguable. But I have been both busy and tired the last couple of weeks, so my posting has taken a real hit.

Part of it is just the sheer weight of trying to lead multiple lives. In the giddiness of first getting together with D, I didn't really think about how much time it would take out of my schedule. But since she left after her Great Cleaning Expedition to go back home and to work, we have talked on the phone almost every night. The thing is, I wait until Wife and the boys are all snugly in bed and asleep. (Never mind what time this is where D lives, but it's not exactly convenient for her either.) I call on my cell phone. (Let's all have a big hand for unlimited evening and weekend minutes!) I make sure I am somewhere I can't be overheard. And then we talk for hours.

Where do those hours come from? In the first place, out of my blogging time -- that's the most immediate victim. In the second place, out of my sleep. In the third place, out of paying our household's bills or keeping up with the mail or any of those other routine kinds of things. So I have been getting short-tempered, ineffective at work, and sloppy about keeping up with our bills or other paperwork. Not that we're actually late on anything ... yet, as far as I know ... but I am the kind of person that starts getting nervous when those sorts of deadlines get too close, and I'm not happy with how close I've let them get.

The easy solution would be to spend less time talking to D, right? Yeah, right. Somehow it hasn't worked out that way. There is always more to discuss. And it's not just whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears, although that has been part of it: we talk about our jobs, our spouses (Wife more than her husband, since she talks to Wife so regularly), our kids, our own childhoods, politics, religion ... all kinds of good stuff. After several calls where I suddenly hit a wall in the middle of a sentence and had to hang up and go to bed, we decided to set a limit. (D gets really upset when she hears that exhaustion in my voice -- it sounds too much like depression to her, and she worries about that in me more than I do.) So we told each other, from now on we'll limit these conversations to 60 minutes -- 90 max! -- and then I'll hang up and go to bed. The first night after agreeing that, we stopped at just about 60 minutes on the nose. The second night it was more like 92 or 93 minutes. And the third night it was closer to 160 .... So much for the easy solution.

This week there was an extra monkey wrench thrown into the gears. For a while now, D has been suggesting as quietly as she could that it would really be great for us to figure out the next time we can see each other. Don't I need to have a business meeting somewhere away from home, sometime soon? This week the topic started coming up more often, and with somewhat greater urgency ... and D finally explained that this really is a big deal for her because of how much time she spends all alone. She is a teacher, working at a school that is far enough away from the house she shares with her husband that she lives in an apartment during the week. Her own kids are already in college. So once the kids leave school, many nights she has nobody to talk to except me until the next morning. And she is in many ways a less solitary person by nature than I am. So the loneliness is really getting to her. And the conversation has turned more and more into, "Come on Hosea, how hard can it be to make up some kind of conference you have to go to? You have the vacation time at work, you have the Frequent Flyer miles, let's just go somewhere!" Only the tireder I am, the less likely I can turn on a dime that way.

A couple days ago I found myself wondering -- not for the first time -- Why do I even have a girlfriend anyway? It can't just be for the sex, because I was coping without that before. Did I not have enough headaches in my life? Did I not have enough people who wanted things from me, and who were going to get upset and personally hurt when I can't make them all happy? Do I just have rocks in my head?

Fortunately all I told D was that I was exhausted and couldn't talk to her that night. I was, too -- I couldn't eat dinner that night, and I fell into bed 5 minutes after the boys did. The next day I got a note from her which said, in part:

There's plenty in my own life that causes me to pause
and reflect. I understand that some choices have to be made, and none of them
are easy. That said, there is no rush, and I much prefer to walk around a
situation several times before actually coming to any hard and fast conclusions.
My current circumstances cause me to be more vulnerable than at other times, but
being alone, as you note, is not a new experience for me. Whatever the future
holds, the center does not. Change is certain, and some of it is out of my hands
completely. What random fortune will offer is also unknown. Frankly, accepting
that ambiguity is not scary; it seems real. And as Son 1 noted, I am a practical
person. I don't prefer fantasy to reality.

It is true to say I am quite passionately in love with
you. I never expected it to be easy; I never expected it at all. Our love is a
journey, without any maps, it seems, and I'm just beginning to learn celestial
navigation. Be patient with me, as I will be with you, and surely we will find
ourselves together again, and as you once said, it will be right.

So I'm "walking around" ... not making any rash decisions when I know they are prompted by exhaustion and not my real feelings. I know I still love her, an awful lot. I won't jeopardize that out of crankiness. But I really have been awfully tired.

Sorry I haven't written.
.