Emotional Mapping in Book Five: Working Through the Maze 2018

This may be a strange entry. I don’t know how it will go but… for a few different reasons I wanted to just sit and kind of map how my day has been. Just… get an emotional landscape built, kind of.

As I assume would be expected from last night’s writing… I did not sleep last night. As has become an unfortunate habit of late. I go to bed at the same time as Wife. She falls asleep quickly. I stay laying. TV on… not really watching it. Back and leg sore and aching. I tune the TV out to sleep (or the TV shuts itself off on the Wife’s timer) and I stay awake. I turn to look at Wife sleeping. She is as beautiful as ever, more beautiful than usual as she isn’t talking (complaining, whining, enraged, etc). Of course, I’d love to move closer to her. Throw an arm around her, sleep in a position of cuddling or contact… something like that. But I don’t. Because… obviously. She doesn’t want that when she’s awake, she doesn’t want that when she’s asleep. I know the rules. I lay in bed with those thoughts running through my head. Thoughts of my marriage having devolved into what it is. Thoughts of my days being almost exclusively… not doing good in the world followed by surviving my home life to be capped off by restless nights.

Invariably, morning comes. Wife wakes up (after the 5th or 6th time hitting snooze.) She leaves the bed. Typically, if I stay in the bed and choose to get sleep, sleep will come to me after Wife leaves for work. Today was such a day. As she was getting ready to go to work, I set my cell phone alarm for Noon. As she left for work, I fell asleep. Sleep was hard. Meaning… I slept a short time (less than 5 hours) but it was a forced “deeper” sleep. My body compensating for itself.

I woke up… ate, puttered about. The actions of the day aren’t what I wanted to focus on here… I wanted to do an emotional thing. The emotion I was feeling was lonely and a little depressed. I put some music on to try to lift my spirits but it didn’t work much. I was still very much feeling lonely and depressed. My life… without work… with the current state of my marriage… lonely and depressed.

I had some errands to run, so I drove out to Wal Mart. Still couldn’t shake my emotional baggage. Lonely and Depressed. But as I searched the aisles of Wal Mart, I started working on it a little. Purchasing food and the like was at least serving a purpose. It was at least better than sitting at home or working around the house. Not quite “eating lunch with an attractive woman that talks to me like a person… but as that is a fantasy and not a real offer, I’ll make due with simple errands.

When I came home, either Divine Inspiration or Random YouTube algorithm gave me an idea of something to watch as I put groceries away and emptied the dishwasher. A nostalgic throwback to darker humor. Llamas with Hats and Charlie the Unicorn. Both series are fairly dark, rely on potentially annoying word uses, and contain unnecessary violence. But it did the trick. Got me laughing. Got me not thinking. Put groceries away. Unloaded the dishwasher. Wife came home. No “welcome home hug” (of course). She just came in… said hey, went to her computer. Strangely, this evening for the most part was okay. Almost good even. Provided I treated our situation like room mates… like people who are “sort of friends.” Keeping our interactions on that level kept things good. Only one little slip in the whole evening… Wife noticed I bought a Skillet Meal where the “Calories per Serving” were around 500 CAL and she asked me not to buy anything that fatty anymore. Doing the math on my typical meal intake… that would still keep me under 1,000 calories per day. But Wife does snack an absolute shit ton. I suggested that we could keep that Meal (or buy it again or something) and make it into 3 servings instead of two. Arguably making each serving small enough to be around 330 CAL or so. Apparently, that wasn’t a suitable option. So I just let the conversation go.

Apparently… that’s what I need to do. Treat her like a room mate, find a way to deal with her Rage and Tantrums when they happen. That’s marriage.