my wife left me (to go back home)

After being in the States for a month, my wife left to go back home to England this past Saturday. Every visit is better than the last, and every goodbye that much harder still.

The melancholy is made worse by its routine nature. Surprises spare you from a protracted wait; whereas seeing the oncoming end only accelerates apprehension.

I’m left with a well-practiced return to habit in the aftermath. Go to bed exhausted from traveling to O’Hare and back again; wake up alone, eat whatever leftovers of Jem’s cooking are still sitting in the fridge (their flavor deadened by her absence), then receive a brief text that reports she’s back home in Essex, before she promptly conks out herself.

Work is a slog. I trudge through each day only to come home to an empty apartment. I’ve been sleeping a lot more—either out of fatigue or heartbreak, I’m not sure. I’ll sit on my phone mindlessly scrolling through YouTube shorts for an hour or two, collapse into bed, then wake up with enough time to shower and make dinner, which I usually halve and put aside for the next day’s lunch.

It usually takes a week or two before I’m back in the swing of things, solo. I always envision myself jumping right back into housework or my hobbies—like I can offset my loneliness with productivity. It never happens.

When we first got together, our goodbyes were bookended by dramatic swells of emotion and longing. Lots of crying and looking back. Now I’ve mastered the efficient farewell: a firm kiss full of promise, one last squeeze of our hands, and a smile that stings with unshed tears.

Generally, we try to have an idea of when we’ll next see each other by the end of a visit, so that we have something to aim for after parting ways. Unfortunately we don’t have that luxury this time. Navigating trips across the Atlantic takes a lot of time, money, and flexibility; we’ve run dry on all three accounts.

I’m hoping that this upcoming weekend will help me reset and I can get some time in to read, write, draw, or at least clean my apartment. I need a change. Right now everything is bleeding together in a dull sequence of mundane melancholy.