Until death do us part

After much work and some actual sleep, I'm halfway back to normal, or thereabouts. When I woke up this morning after seven whole hours of sleep, I felt better and I didn't feel like I was dragging around a body encased in cement. Now all I need to do is get rid of the cough. It's not a sick cough but a sinuses tracking down the back of my throat cough, what Beanie calls boogies in the throat. She can be so crude sometimes.

It hasn't been nearly as hard slogging through the usual day's work and I even took a little lunch break to get a salad and some falafel chips to go with my roasted red pepper hummus. Now I'm craving crystallized ginger. What's that about?

Anyway, during my work day I received a bonus, the last edit of my first novel. That's what kept me from being able to sleep for the past few weeks. Redoing scenes, cutting repetitive words, rewriting sections and turning the heat up just a notch. Not too much since the hero doesn't get the heroine until . . . well, that would be giving away a little bit too much. You'll just have to buy the book. I can't wait to see the cover.

In the meantime, I'm finishing up The Real Messiah, catching cat naps and going to bed early for a change, although I think sleep will elude me if I don't get to the edits tonight. The undone edits will follow me into my sleep like a nagging husband with OCD. I my case, that would be my ex-husband Nick. There's nothing like washing the dishes and having him pull out the microscope to examine every surface to make sure there are no latent bacteria waiting to jump out and poison his food the next time I cook dinner. This from a man who left dishes in a sink full of soapy water until the water became stringy and slimy and just plain nasty. That's when he'd rinse them off.

At least my taste in men has improved . . . some. It's also the reason I choose to live alone. I've become so used to the quiet and being able to zone out on writing or reading or whatever without someone expecting me to entertain them or pay attention to them every minute we're together. Don't get me wrong. I have long periods of time when I'm up for entertainment and paying attention, but when I'm in the writing zone, everything else fades away. It's not always a good thing because I tend to forget anything that doesn't tug at my bladder or weight my eyelids with lead, but men tend not to understand those kinds of things unless they too are creative or are too busy entertaining someone else to worry about it.

When I talked to Mom this afternoon she asked why I didn't find someone and get married so I don't die alone. "Mom, we all die alone."

"Your dad didn't die alone and I won't either. No one dies alone unless they choose that."

"Mom, we all die alone. It's a personal experience that excludes everyone. You may be there, but you're not doing the dying."

"What if something happens to you and no one notices until you forget to pay the utilities or the phone or the rent?"

"Then I hope it's at the end of the month and not at the beginning after I just paid the rent."

"You're hopeless. You need to get married."

The rest of the conversation is pretty much the usual mother-daughter exchange where the mother lays out her fears about dying alone and how a man would make it easier. Yeah, right. What if he dies first? Do I become a black widow and keep trawling for husbands until I finally die before they do? I'd have to start choosing younger and younger men. The demand for daily sex alone would be enough to age them before their time, and the idea of being married to someone as young as or younger than my own sons gives me the creeps. I don't think so.

There's no guarantee that someone will be there when I die. Mom won't get married again because she said she had 57 years with her soul mate and there will never be another man like Dad. I think it's quite a different story. Everyone who has ever met my mother and is in her age group (pushing the bottom out of 80, as she says) has already found someone to marry or headed for the hills. No one likes being tossed into the ball crushing penis grinder by choice. Well, she might be able to find a submissive man who likes being bullied, preferably one with lots of money Mom can spend, but I think even a masochist would rather find a leather-and-spike-wearing Amazon dominatrix in 8-inch stilettos than tangle with my mom. What a choice: Mom who grinds men's bones to make her bread or a zoned out writer like me.