I Don't Miss Him. I Miss Having Someone to Yell at About the Thermostat.

Let me be clear about something upfront. I don't miss him.

I really don't. I don't miss the specific rhythm of his breathing at 3 AM, and I don't miss the sound of him clearing his throat before he said anything important, a verbal tic I used to find endearing and then, toward the end, began to suspect was the sound of him rehearsing a lie. I don't miss the way he pronounced "espresso," or the car magazines on the coffee table, or being asked, routinely, if I was "sure about that haircut."

I don't miss him.

I miss the shape of him, which is a different and much weirder thing. Nobody warns you about it, probably because it doesn't sound sad enough to write a song about.

Here is what I actually miss.

I miss having somebody to yell at about the thermostat. I kept it at exactly 68 for three weeks after he left, because he always wanted it at 72, and I felt smug, and then I realized I had been setting it to 68 as a small daily victory in a war nobody was fighting anymore. It just feels cold in here now. There is no war. There is just me, in a sweater, in a house that is exactly the temperature I want it to be.

I miss having somebody to blame for the milk. When the milk is out, it is my fault now. This is upsetting.

I miss shoes by the door. Not his specifically, just any shoes. A pair of shoes by the door is a sign that somebody lives here besides you. My shoes alone look like a still life titled Woman Came Home And Died.

I miss complaining about a snore. I do not miss the snore itself, but I miss having a snore as an agenda item. You cannot imagine how much narrative structure a snore provides until it is gone.

I miss the weight, the weight of another person on the other side of the mattress. I bought a weighted blanket, but it is not the same. A weighted blanket does not shift when it dreams.

I miss being able to say we. I am single, a divorcée, a party of one, and those are all accurate words, and none of them have the casual gravity of "we're thinking of going" or "we'll pass on the wedding" or even "we're not really into that."

I miss having someone to be annoyed by. I have a cat now. She is lovely, but not, structurally, annoying. She is indifferent, which is a different skill set.

Here is the part I am still working out. None of this is about him.

If he came back tomorrow, I would not let him back into this house, and I would not rehire him for the position. The position, in fact, has been dissolved, and there is no position.

But sometimes, at 9 PM on a Tuesday, when nothing is wrong and nothing is right and the freezer is making that sound I am probably going to have to deal with eventually, I feel the absence of the shape. I do not feel the absence of the man, just the shape.

Somebody built that shape into the architecture of my life over two decades, and then one day he took it with him, and now there is a man-shaped hole in my kitchen and it whistles when the wind hits it wrong.

I am sure this passes. People tell me it passes. The women who have already been through it get a certain look in their eyes when they say it, though, a look that suggests what actually happens is that the shape shrinks, slowly, the way a bruise shrinks, from purple to green to yellow to huh, when did that go away?

In the meantime, I will be over here, in a 68-degree house, yelling at nobody about the thermostat.

The thermostat is winning, but at least I have opinions.