Tonight is hard.

Everything is wrong this week. Students have been difficult. I'm fighting with Jake over e-mail. I'm overthinking things with The Boy like I haven't in a while. I haven't slept. I feel empty and exhausted and alone and utterly miserable.

So I'm sitting here in this chair and crying in my empty living room, and what feels the worst is that I am here alone. It's just me. There's no one to hug me, or make me a cup of tea, or just be a presence in the vast and echoing void that is this Friday.

What makes it worse is that, at the same time that it's horrible to be alone, I don't want the alternative. I don't want what I had with Jake back — he was lousy with the hugs and the tea-making anyway. And I'm reasonably certain I don't want anyone else here: I know, for sure, that I don't want to live with anyone. I don't want a roommate. I don't want a partner to move in. I don't even know that I'm ready to be in a same-city relationship.

So how do I reconcile this horrifying loneliness, this feeling of, I am here, in this chair, and there is no one here with me, this wishing someone shared this space and was with me, with all of that I feel in less exhausted and weepy moments?

I would like to sit here and cry without the additional cognitive dissonance.