Thing that doesn’t make me happy: spending hours cleaning and scrubbing the house for a Sunday open house that’s attended by exactly one person (and my real estate agent suspects he was a curious neighbor rather than a buyer).

I need this house to be sold. Soon. It’s such a great house and I used to love it so. Part of me still loves it. But the the thirty-mile commute is only going to become more and more of a problem. Worse still, the place is just too big, too expensive, and too maintenance-intensive for me to handle all by myself. Factor in the fact that I’m a little depressed every time I walk in the door these days and you’ll maybe understand how the house I loved has become something of a giant albatross.

As many of you may have deduced, yer humble host is single again after nine and a half years. Mark and I decided a little over two weeks ago that it was time to call it quits. There’s no animosity between us. We love and care about each other and we’ll always consider each other “family.” It’s just that we’ve grown in very different directions over the past few years, and we’ve developed very different views of what we want out of life. Eventually we hit a point where we realized that the incompatibility–and the lack of communication about it–had more or less strangled our relationship. That’s the short version. There’s a longer version, but it has the same basic plot and the same exact ending and I’m not going to share it here.

It would be an understatement to say that this is the single most painful thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. I’ve shed more tears than I knew I was capable of producing. It doesn’t get much sadder than realizing that you’re not going to spend the rest of your life with the person you’d planned on spending it with. The way I’d envisioned the next phase of my life has been drastically altered just when I was expecting to be happy and excited about how successfully I’d “reinvented” myself in the past few years. This has magnified every little insecurity I’ve ever had about myself–I have a lot of them, thanks–and it makes the standard midlife crisis look like a fucking walk in the park.

However, I’ve finally arrived at a point where I’m managing (with some exceptions) not to wallow in it. That’s significant for me. I have a history of being fairly self-indulgent in my depressions and I’m not going to let it happen this time. I can’t let it happen this time, because a depression of this magnitude might break me if I let it take hold. Fortunately, I have my work to focus on now; I love it and frankly it’s really sort of all I have right now.  And I think that may be what ends up saving me. Anyway, I’m going to live. I’ve not yet managed anything resembling optimism about the future, but I think I may arrive at “neutral” one of these days.

So anyway, if you know someone who needs a really nice house in Winston-Salem, I’m willing to make a deal. You get a free home warranty and I get to maintain my sanity. No pressure, though.

A little addendum: I apologize for this mass announcement. I haven’t talked with many people about this, because frankly it’s not a terribly pleasant thing to repeat over and over again. I appreciate your support but this is personal and not really subject to public comment. Thanks to all of you for being here for me, even though I may not really want to talk about it that much for now. And thanks to Mark for nine of the happiest years of my life. I never thought I wanted a relationship like this, but I’m damned glad I had it, even if it didn’t end up lasting forever as we’d hoped.

Kind of an exhausting week. Substantial heartfelt updates this weekend. Maybe.