The date to close on the house is rapidly approaching \u2014 April 30th.\u00a0 So far, the stars are in alignment… the contract is a lock, the loan is a done deal (at a fairly awesome interest rate), my mortgage company deserves some sort of posthumous Medal of Honor for throwing themselves on the worst of the paperwork grenade and absorbing all the shrapnel for me.\u00a0 I cut a check for my portion of the roof as a deposit (upgrading to the better roof for a fraction of the cost), and the work is a go as soon as the ink dries next Wednesday.<\/p>\n
So why do I feel like a guitar string being tightened to the point of snapping, giving off metallic pings and tremors just before shearing?\u00a0 I’m raw, I’m on edge, and my nerves feel like they’re being sandpapered.\u00a0 I feel like I’m drowning at times, for want to get my head above the waves of this emotional ocean.<\/p>\n
I’m lonely as hell.\u00a0 The one person I want to spend as much time as humanly possible with is 5000+ miles, and an ocean away.\u00a0 We IM, we video every so often, we talk on the phone now and again and I am comforted, elated and feel her companionship… but the second the signal is severed, I’m left alone again in my little apartment.<\/p>\n
I can be alone, that’s something I learned about myself and am quite comfortable with.\u00a0 But now that I have a such a wonderful girl in my life, I want nothing more than to be close to her, and I can’t.\u00a0 At least not yet.\u00a0 Yet the loneliness I feel is not from living alone, and is felt more sharply owing to the immediate stresses pressing down on me.<\/p>\n
I have friends galore, whom I don’t get to see enough of.\u00a0 Some of them are new friends, and they’re wonderful but we’re still trying to get our equilibrium with one another.\u00a0 Some of them are old friends, and are the backbone of my emotional support system \u2014 they are the comfortable, well known easy chair I can turn to when times are rough, to cradle me, support me, and give me comfort when the world is crumbling down around my ears.\u00a0 Except that they have problems of their own, or are soul searching and rediscovering who they are, or they are growing in a different direction, or they don’t feel like putting up with my crap any more, or I’ve done such a wonderful job of disguising my emotional state that they don’t realize anything is amiss.\u00a0 So with a few notable exceptions, my comfy easy chair has left the building… I have a small cushion left, and that’s about it (and I’m thankful for that cushion, or I’d have lost my mind completely by now).<\/p>\n
And this lack of being able to lean on my friends for a change has done nothing to improve my mindset.\u00a0 I’m grouchy, irritable, and throwing off negative waves like a corpse off-gassing the stench of decay.\u00a0 I’m afraid I’m wearing thin on those who have<\/em> been putting up with me, including my girl who is oh-so-far away.\u00a0 But still, what underlies it all is the fact that I’m bone-achingly lonely, and normally it’s not a problem except that right now it’s compounded by the fact that I’m about to lay out a huge sum of money all in one go, and that a figurative chunk of blue ice could fall from the empty sky and wreck the whole house deal.<\/p>\n I need some familiar company.\u00a0 I don’t even want to go on at length about my problems, I just need companionship and a meal, a movie or a beer in comfortable surroundings.\u00a0 I need distractions from my stresses, preferably in a small group of two or three.\u00a0 I need someone to make me laugh \u2014 to release that valve on the top of my head like a pressure cooker.\u00a0 Someone to engage me in a conversation that does not include “house”, “contract”, “closing” or “down payment” in it.\u00a0 I have made attempts with sub-par success.\u00a0 Maybe I am too good at hiding my mental state.\u00a0 Maybe I’m comically lousy at it, and that’s chasing everyone off like Frankenstein\u2019s monster smashing the door in.<\/p>\n But the one thing I don’t want is sympathy.\u00a0 I don’t want a pat on the head and exclamations of “poor baby!”.\u00a0 I’m not fishing for a pity round at the local pub.\u00a0 I’m not looking for a sudden onslaught of calls and texts out of the clear blue sky looking to hang out because people read this post and suddenly feel bad for me, or guilty, or obligated \u2014 I’ll take my lonely little apartment over that any day.\u00a0 In fact, I don’t know what I want, except to not feel like too little butter scraped over too much bread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The date to close on the house is rapidly approaching \u2014 April 30th.\u00a0 So far, the stars are in alignment… the contract is a lock, the loan is a done deal (at a fairly awesome interest rate), my mortgage company deserves some sort of posthumous Medal of Honor for throwing themselves on the worst of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aggravation","category-rambling","category-stress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dmentd.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}