A Girl...

On the Outside Looking In

I feel like I've been unnecessarily quiet in relation to all the free time I've had. Since I flew home on Monday, things have been pretty leisurely in my little life. I've spent most of my time army crawling around taking mediocre low-perspective pictures of the cats. Other activities include cringing at the local news personalities--the hair, the accent, the closemindedness, gaaaahh--and twiddling my thumbs. My mom has been cooking fabulous meals, my brother picked up cribbage rules in about thirty seconds and now beats me handily, and my dad is being his normal charming self and not going too overboard with the gangster rap, so that's good. Yes, I'm having a good time. Yes, it's nice to be off work and away from my daily responsibilities. Yes, I'm enjoying the fam. Yes, but.

YES, BUT I miss Simon something awful and I'm not very good at dealing with it. I'm counting the days, people, and there are eight more to go until he comes home, and eight might as well be eight hundred the way I feel right now.

He tells me to chill out and just enjoy myself. He tells me to chill out because he's coming back. But sometimes I feel like he wants me to chill out so he doesn't have to cater to my ridiculous and unnecessary neediness because, dude, it's harshing his jolly old English mellow. Who wants to deal with this kind of garbage on vacation, right?

The good news is, that penultimate sentence is based on perceptions formed entirely within my own brain and not an observation of Simon's outward behavior. Simon is full of "love you, baby"s and hasn't said anything even remotely like "chill out." I just know he must be thinking the "chill out"s because I'm thinking them, and I'm the one needing the chilling. Sigh. It's just that, well, I'm used to spending about fifteen hours with him every day, and I'm used to having him only a phone call away, and I'm used to having him call me every hour or so...Hence, these one-liner emails and impersonal blog posts just aren't doing it for me right now. I MISS YOU!

Again, this isn't the result of anything he's done wrong (although a longer email would be nice...). I think it's mostly that I feel kind of sad that I'm missing the Mel and Kilo celebration. Simon, being an old man at nearly 31, has already had a lifetime's worth of big celebratory moments, and even though it sounds stupid, I'm actually pretty bummed I've missed so many of them. I have gotten jealous of the friends he had when he was fourteen. Yeah, I should get over that. The thing is, since we started dating, I was excited to think I'd be a part of the big moments in his life from that moment on, but now the big engagement has happened and they're all having a party, and I'm stuck being happy for them all alone, unable to even extend a direct congratulations because his sister hasn't even met me and, frankly, isn't really looking forward to (for a variety of complicated reasons). I guess it just sucks to want to be a part of someone's life (his sister's) and not have your goodwill recognized the way it's intended. And this is the part where I slap myself because this is not a pity party and this is not about me, but damn it if I still don't feel a little left out.

Blech.

Simon, I miss you. Come home.