Deep in the Shallows

Alright, so I forgot about ironing. What's the big deal? Leaving some wrinkles in my clothes is an intentional cry for help. After all, if I outwardly appeared to get along just fine without any wife to look after me, nobody would be able to realize the existential dread that haunts me every instant of consciousness. I'm hoping that wrinkly pants will be enough of a hint.

Last night, I hauled myself into my bedroom and prepared for the sweet oblivion of sleep to carry me into the next day. However, as I waited for the air conditioner to cool my place of repose into a balmy 78 degrees F, I decided to jump into the shower to help with the heat. I turned the shower on, and then thought I might as well lay my head down for a moment while the shower heated up (yes, I take warm showers to cool down. What's it to you?). Five hours later, I awoke to the water still running. Erk! That was a pretty bad start to my morning.

I just love to digress. But here's the deal, straight-up and true as a teenager's Angst: I'm starting to adapt to life on my own. I've done plenty of exaggerating about my living habits when my wife is around, but the truth is that I can be kind of a slob when I have somebody who's willing to pick up after me (who can't?) By myself, though, I'm developing a sort of weird desire to keep my place clean, just in case I forget to turn on the oven fan and asphyxiate myself while trying to cook some delicious bacon. I don't want my eventual rescuer/discoverer to have to drag me out of a messy place! That would just be embarrassing. And so I keep my home nice; the next step, obviously, is to wear a suit at all times, to save my family the trouble of dressing me should I slip on a discarded banana peel and do a face plant into the garbage disposal. I have a very malleable skull.

Between evolving into a semi-neat freak (compared to how I was before) and no longer deriving much refreshment from sleep, I think I might be taking on some significant insanity here. Before my wife left on her trip, I would happily have admitted to being "crazy," in the sense of "quirky and fun at parties." But no, I'm pretty sure that I've now hit all the benchmarks for lower-level derangement. I'm beginning to seriously wonder if my wife wasn't just a hallucination I had, an apparition, a mere symptom of my madness that the people I see regularly are happy to humor me about. I mean, if I have the capacity to live on my own -- if this ability was in me all along -- then who's to say I ever needed her at all? Maybe she's actually a split personality, and at one point my brain forked into two parts and assigned all the cleaning to the other one.

The cleaning, the cooking, the laughing, the smiling. That's her department.

I'm not entirely serious, but a small part of me wonders. I know the way I'd deal with someone suffering with a similar ailment; my grandmother has Alzheimer's, and I often simply go along with the fantasies she suggests rather than try to force her to face reality. I can't be entirely sure that the same thing isn't happening to me. I only really have one option: wait until my wife gets back, and then hold her so closely and tightly that I can be absolutely convinced she's really there. It'll be an unbelievably beautiful feeling to hold her again, and to reassert my sanity.