Thursday, February 14, 2008

Thursday in the audience without the fiancé

We gave ourselves a week off from the gym after we got home from the cruise. Of course, that week stretched to two. And it would have made it to three if I hadn’t found myself wide awake this morning at 3:00. The fiancé had just left for another long trip* and I was suddenly alone and very wide-eyed in our big bed.

*For the record, this marks our second Valentine’s Day apart. But every day in our house is like Valentine’s Day (blogsickness bags are located in the seat pocket in front of you) so we don’t mark the official Valentine’s Day by exchanging any more saccharine text messages than we would on any random Thursday.

So there I was all alone in our big bed. And I did what any lonely, red-blooded man would do in my situation: I fired up my laptop. And there, by the warm, flickering glow of my screen, I furtively played with my impressively lengthy—and uncomfortably hard—list of Scrabulous!™ games on Facebook. Then I answered about 10 emails that had been languishing in my inbox. Then—since it was already 6:00 and my alarm was within an hour of going off anyway—I got dressed and headed to the gym.

It wasn’t until I was well into my 20-minute stair climb that I looked down and realized it was a good thing my husband-hunting days were behind me. Because in the dark this morning I somehow ended up dressing myself like a bar mitzvah clown: white running shoes, yesterday’s black dress socks, yesterday’s moss green undershirt and terrorist-alert orange running shorts that had climbed clear up my thighs to celebrate the invention of static cling. I was definitely looking less than my best. And husbands, my lord, are weak.

My day has been a sleep-deprived fog ever since, though I’m proud to report I did manage to assemble a reasonably color-coordinated office ensemble in time for work.

And now it’s almost 8:00 pm. And while I’m still at work, the fiancé is nestled snugly in a Broadway theater digesting a faux-Mexican dinner while watching a British revival of an American musical about a French painter. I’m engaged to the goddamn U.N.

But before he got his passport stamped, he sent me a saccharine Valentine’s Day text message telling me how much he wishes he could be sharing all this with me tonight:

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