Day Eight: My Roommate is Getting in the Way of My Aloneness

I miss living alone. I have lived alone off and on for most of my adult life or at least with various roommates who were never home (loved the four years I lived with my Pops, we were never home at the same time). I don't count my relationships. Living with David and Jeff is the same as alone to a certain degree because you are a couple. Though I'd have to say that in the last three years even when Jeff and I were together I was mostly alone. He wasn't present very much in our home life the last few months of NYC and in Kansas he basically lived in the office. Then he was deployed again and I was truly alone. I got into a rhythm and habit of how I do things and really just how to tolerate that solitude. I am not a naturally outgoing person, so there will be days that I don't leave the house or talk to another person if i don't have to.

Jeff kept me balanced, righting me when I listed too far one way or the other. There are definitely times when I am social and if too much alcohol is involved I can be social to an extreme so it was good to have that support network there to keep me steady. Living alone though is also somewhat comforting in that familiar sense that we all learn to recognize as normal. My things, my space, my mess and my quiet. Jeff is gone now, but I have a roommate. He moved in a couple of months ago and he's very nice and fairly quiet. Problem is, HE'S IN MY HOUSE. There are days when I come home, so anxious for the feeling of my solitude away from the world and the sudden remembrance of a stranger in my place hits me like a punch in the face as I open the front door.

We all get so mired in the routines of our lives and take for granted the conditions in which we live. I did too. I loved living alone, I loved living with Jeff before he sort of evaporated into his own world, but now I find that I am hating home and that is an awful feeling. As much as I miss coming home to my husband and his support and love, I also miss the quiet and womb-like protectiveness of coming home to my private space now that he has left. I'd prefer to be with him of course, even the hellish Fayetteville, NC would be worth it for the chance to live with my husband once again, but as that is not an option, the best I can hope for is MY space with no intrusions.

What is it about us as people that makes some of us long for the noise and chaos of companionship and for others it is the quiet and quintessential aloneness that we find soothing? I think maybe that 18 months of living with my husband, but not really feeling his presence and then another 12 months of him being in Iraq somehow changed me. I learned to count on that aloneness as the only thing I could count on. It became the familiar in the way his partnership used to be. So now I wonder if I am ruined. Can I learn to live with someone else again? Am I destined to be some old, cat lady who spends more time discussing toys and claw marks in furniture and flesh with my pets than actual conversations with other people?

I know that the thought of continuing to live with another person who is not my husband makes me physically anxious and yet there is no alternative, not for a while anyway. I am stuck with a roommate. I am stuck with feeling like a guest in my own home and spending more time in my bedroom with the door closed than in the actual living areas of my house. I am back in school, back to bartending, and now back to a roommate. My life has become a series of regressions. Which is sort of ironic, because if I could truly regress back to another time in my life I would definitely do a few things differently. The first of which, would be to drag my husband back into our life so that I never had the chance to get used to being alone and feeling alone.

I don't know if it's too late to change any of those things that really matter, but I do know that if I'm going to be stuck feeling so alone, I'd much rather actually get to be alone while doing it.