The Fourteen Day Daze

I’m living in a daze of days, each one like the next. I’m floating through long periods of dreaming, punctuated by sudden moments of lucidity. Time becomes pliable; it stretches out and contracts. The future is a long rubber tunnel, and the present moment is solid and unmoving.

My life without John is like that.

Noticing time seems to arrest it, so I ignore it as much as possible. Although, when you try to ignore a thing it can hound you.

I’m afraid I’ve become rather antisocial. I love solitude, and I can quite easily spend all of my time alone, looking into novels and flipping through channels, cooking and tidying up, watching films and browsing through the library, and I don’t speak to a single soul for days. Then, when I go back to work, it’s an effort to rouse myself and talk to strangers. It’s as though I’ve forgotten how.

John has always been the one to make me feel social and outgoing. It’s strange: it’s easier to be confident when he’s around. Who cares what other people think, when I’ve already won the regard of the only person who really matters?

We’ve been together now for five years, and until now, the longest we’d been apart was a weekend. Literally every day now for five years, we’ve eaten the same food, slept in the same bed, and breathed the same air; we’ve spent hours in comfortable silence, and hours in long conversation. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve always had our own lives, our own interests and our own friends. But at the end of the day, we were always bound to be together. For this past year in New Zealand, we’ve spent nearly all day, every day with each other: we’ve slept and woken up together, worked, cooked, eaten, partied, hiked, shopped, and traveled together.

Who knew that I would love spending so much time in one person’s company? I’m not sure what it is about John’s personality that makes him so easy to live with.

In that context, six weeks seems like an awfully long time to be apart. But at least it’s an opportunity to reflect on ourselves, to remember what it’s like to be alone, and to miss each other, to appreciate those things that we love about each other.

After a month apart, here is a list of the top 10 things I miss about John.

1.       His presence, especially when we’re in the same room doing different things, and I look over at him and he doesn’t notice.

2.       His smell and taste. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it, but some people just have a pheromonal attraction. As far as my senses are concerned, he’s home.

3.       The way he makes me laugh. He’s just so damn entertaining.

4.       When I walk into a room and he says “There she is,” like he’s been waiting for me.

5.       Little details, like the laugh-lines under his left eye and the smudge of amber on his iris.

6.       Unlimited, fascinating, profound and pointless conversation. I really miss hearing the stories of his day, and being able to tell him random things whenever I think of them.

7.       The fact that he’s always on top of practical things, like the laundry, turning the oven off and remembering the door key. I’m extremely absent-minded, so I appreciate how he takes care.

8.       The look on his face when he’s concentrating.

9.       The way he always tries to share my pillow even though he has his own.

10.   Sometimes in the middle of the night, he’ll do this thing where he rolls over and wakes up and mumbles something to me, but if I answer he’s already asleep again. It just kills me.

We’ve spent a month apart, but strangely enough, when I think back, it doesn’t seem that long – not really. The only unbearable part is being away from him right now, this moment. No: the really unbearable thing is facing ahead, into the long tunnel, the next two weeks without him, all of those accumulated moments when I will miss him and feel his absence.

And yet, when he is here, it will seem as though no time at all has passed.

When we’re together, I will realize that six weeks, in retrospect, is nothing. It will have seemed easy. It will have seemed short.

Time is like that. Like a house of mirrors. When you look ahead of you, into the future, the room looks endless, a wind-tunnel stretching to convex proportions; and when you look at your reflection, in that moment, it seems solid; and when you look behind you, all of the reflections accumulate into a single retrospect that is concave, strangely small, and surprisingly close.

Fourteen days left and counting.