Say hello before you say goodbye

My husband is going away for about six days. He leaves Sunday and I'm depressed already thinking about it. It's rather ridiculous if you look at it objectively since we maintained a long-distance relationship for almost a year and a half, but this will be the first time either of us has been away for more than a day or so since I picked up my life and moved here.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I'll go to work, sleep, and then what? For most of my free hours, I'm with him and now I'll have a week of just me, the dog, and the cat, neither of whom, despite their best efforts will be able to joke with me and make my long day at work seem funny rather than soul-crushing. I know I sound codependent, and maybe I am, but he isn't just my husband, he's my best friend. There aren't people physically nearby with whom I'm at all close. I have one friend, and we're very casual. She isn't the kind of person I can call up on a whim and ask to go shopping at Walmart with me because I need to buy cat litter.

It's shaping up to be a long week, folks. I can read, I suppose, since I've taken to doing that more often than not these days when I'm awake and alone, but there won't be a break in it for human company. I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of time asleep or at the gym.

My problem comes from the fact that by nature I am a loner. I don't generally like to be around people, personally speaking. Call me a snobby elitist, but I expect a certain measure of intelligence from people who want to keep my company and to be blunt most people don't hit the mark. Besides that, I have an abrasive personality in many ways. I'm usually honest, whether or not the intended appreciates that. I'm caustic, callous, and if you give me a reason to mock you, I will. There aren't very many people I'm compatible with, and the few people I have found who can stomach me and whom I can stomach are usually separated from me by vast distances.

My husband is one of those people and for the past year I haven't been separated from him hardly at all. We aren't clingy and our companionship isn't forced. We just enjoy each other's company above and beyond sex, or marriage, or duty. I've grown used to having him with me, and now I'll have to go back to my solitary ways, though only for a week, and I will be lonely for the first time in a very, very long time.

I haven't ever been lonely in the sense of missing companionship because until this past year I've never really had a companion. I've had casual friends whom I could handle in small doses, and a few in slightly larger doses, but they were always people I would pick up and put away at my whim, cruel as that may sound. I have never been attached to my family. I'm just really not suited to being a social creature. I'm too intolerant of too many things. It's just my nature, and I don't apologize for it. The only friend I have maintained for more than a few years moved away after only a year of being local and we have maintained our close friendship from a distance, so in her I never found a companion, only a confidante. If ever I have been lonely, it has been for lack of immediate diversion from myself, not for any one person. Any person would have done.

As my relationship with my husband progressed we were only together for four months before he left to join the Marines, and then the relationship was based on distance and scattered visits. Eventually I moved to Rhode Island and vested my interests in him and that has been this past year.

The conclusion all this rambling, maudlin exposition has been for is that I am feeling lonely for the first time in earnest and I don't know how to handle it, nor do I have company with which to mitigate it. I am a twenty year old dealing with issues most people discard in childhood.