Tonight is hard.

Everything is wrong this week. Students have been difficult. I'm fighting with Jake over e-mail. I'm overthinking things with The Boy like I haven't in a while. I haven't slept. I feel empty and exhausted and alone and utterly miserable.

So I'm sitting here in this chair and crying in my empty living room, and what feels the worst is that I am here alone. It's just me. There's no one to hug me, or make me a cup of tea, or just be a presence in the vast and echoing void that is this Friday.

What makes it worse is that, at the same time that it's horrible to be alone, I don't want the alternative. I don't want what I had with Jake back — he was lousy with the hugs and the tea-making anyway. And I'm reasonably certain I don't want anyone else here: I know, for sure, that I don't want to live with anyone. I don't want a roommate. I don't want a partner to move in. I don't even know that I'm ready to be in a same-city relationship.

So how do I reconcile this horrifying loneliness, this feeling of, I am here, in this chair, and there is no one here with me, this wishing someone shared this space and was with me, with all of that I feel in less exhausted and weepy moments?

I would like to sit here and cry without the additional cognitive dissonance.

When I told him about First Wives World, the conversation went like this:

Me: Dad — I've got sort of a writing job. I'm going to be posting on a website.

Dad: That's great! Hold on, let me get Jean on the phone — she's watching Doppler. Jean!

[pause]

Stepmom: Hi!

Dad: She's going to be writing for...what's it for?

Me: A website. It's a site for divorced women.

Stepmom: Really? So what are you going to write about?

Me: Well, you know — getting divorced. Trying to date after getting divorced.

Dad: [throat clearing] So ... if you're writing about dating, that means, er — that means there is dating?

Stepmom: What's the site?

Me: Oh, no. You can't read it.

Dad: But we want to!

Me: No. I'm totally not comfortable with that.

Stepmom: C'mom! We can handle it! We're not old fuddy-duddies!

Me: The fact that you just said that...no way.

Dad: But we want to read your work!

Me in my head: Dad. Jean. I'm going to write about dating. And sex. That means you will be reading about my one-night-stand and how I'm trying to figure out pubic hair grooming expectations. Do you really want to know about that?

Me on the phone: I don't think I'd be able to...speak freely about — certain things — if I knew you were reading.

Dad: [silence]

Stepmom: ...maybe it's for the best that we don't.

Dad: We're proud of you anyway, honey.