Why I had to listen to Vertical Horizon tonight.

Poor Lolo is going to have weird dreams.

Before we begin, some acknowledgements are in order:

- My blog has been waaayy RBf heavy lately. And obnoxious about it. Sorry.

- It's had a couple "serious" posts lately. Like downer posts, I guess. Sorry.

- This one is the queen mother of all those downer posts. Really sorry.

- I think we can all agree that I bounced back pretty quickly from the emotional gitmo that was December. You remember. Back when I found out my husband cheated on me, watched him leave, got robbed the first week I was financially on my own, and got sick three separate times. 

- Really. I didn't cry all that much after my husband left.

- I hyphenate everything, I just noticed. Sorry.

Now I'm moving. I'm packing up every belonging in my home. When the SH left, he took what I said he could, and nothing more. And at that time, I thought that:

All Our Crap

(minus)

His Crap

(=)

My Crap...

As it turns out, that was some seriously misguided arithmetic. In actuality, I have what's left of our entire life, minus the tidy, hand-picked stash he made off with. I'm left here in this big old house with stuff I (/he) forgot about in closets and drawers and under beds. Everything I dig up, it's like I forget for a second that I'm not back in my comfortable, financially secure, everyday marriage. And then I have to *remember all over again. 

And I have to think of what to do with all this stupid shit. It's speed-deciding, or decision-making on steriods (See? With the hyphens?). Do I keep this? Do I text the SH and ask if he wants it? Do I throw it away? And it makes me feel all weird. I am now physically realizing that loss. Not with the absence of all his things, but through the presence of them.

In my initial sadness, I exhumed an old friendship, and lo and behold, it still had a pulse. And beyond a pulse, that guy--the darling, flaky, non-committal boy who was always a best friend when he wasn't a boyfriend--was back in my life. And I was happy. I didn't feel loss. I have been focusing on everything that felt like the opposite of loss. I focus, to this very moment, on anything reclaimed.

The SH has gone through those required stages of realization, the hurt, the harshness, the reality. He feels the loss. He's paying his dues, dues that I've been shirking. I kind of feel like a loser about it.

And now I'm there. Unearthing those 50-count battery packs, and stupid cords, and coin-rolling machines, all those things that I would NEVER own by myself, things that were just plain HIS...well, there it is. There's that kick to the gut. I'm uprooting the last place we made our life together. It isn't my home I'm packing up, it was ours.

One night, and one night only, right after he moved out, I woke up in the middle of the night in sheer panic, realizing that I no longer had a husband. I can't explain what kind of horror that caused me. But it did. I talked some sense into myself and went back to sleep. 

For a second tonight, as I realized how much household income he took with him (dammit) and how different my living situation will be in 8 days, and I got that panic feeling again. Fleeting, but brutal. I had to change the playlist on my Zune to exclude anything that I listened to when I knew the SH. So now, it's a bunch of Taylor Swift and stuff from 2000. (Ah, the year 2000).

That kick to the gut isn't me missing him, or feeling the loss of HIM. It's the realization of the loss of my stability. That was the one thing I loved about marriage. I guess I learned my lesson on that one, huh. Marriage does not = stability. The "stability" of my life is at its all-time low. The unknowns that sit ahead of me aren't exciting question marks, like the ones that come right after graduating college. These ones are scary. 

So my life is not all that perfect. It is not Seriously So Blessed. I mean, it is blessed, but I need to take a minute and paint it in its true imperfect color. Sometimes, I think I need to acknowledge that what happened to me was a very sad thing.

When I find out about the next chapter, you'll be the first to know. 

*Like my great-grandma with Alzheimers' who asks 20 times a day where her husband is. (Correct Answer: Um, with Jesus). We tell her he's in the next room, because, well, who wants to break the news to a woman that she's a widow 20 times a day?