No housework.

No job to get to.

No children coming home imminently.

The cable and Internet were scheduled to be installed the next day so I didn’t even have that.

All of sudden, I had the strange feeling of being crushed.

Crushed by the weight of all that was new that was around me.

Crushed by the weight of all that I had to do to make my house a home.

Crushed by the weight of all my mistakes and the effort I knew it would take to remedy them.

Crushed by loneliness. Loneliness that in all my years of being alone I hadn’t even begun the work to make the change from feeling that to feeling aloneness and being comfortable with it.

Crushed by the fear of the specter of my parents who were remaining aloof, but they’d tire of that and then they’d invade in insidious ways that could obliterate the fragile embryo of what I was trying to create.

It took effort. It took time. I stood in my beautiful open plan kitchen with its views of blue sea as I expended that effort and took that time.

Then I made a plan.

I grabbed my phone, pulled up the app that found places that you needed that were close, hit the map to let the GPS guide my way and I went back out to my car.

I pulled out of my garage and headed to the home improvement store. There, I gathered so many paint chips I could set up a display in my house.

I then drove to the closest mall, not only so I would know where it was, but so I could buy a few books.

Only then did I go home.

I put the paint chips in a kitchen drawer. I’d go through them after the house sale and when I’d lived at Cliff Blue awhile so I knew what the walls needed (and incidentally, I loved that name and determined to refer to my house by its name even on the address labels I would order when I had the Internet).

Instead, I did something I’d never done in my life (though part of it I couldn’t do as in La Jolla I had a house on a golf course, not by a beach). Something I’d never even considered doing.

I spent time with me.

I did this lying on my couch with a glass of wine. I sometimes read. I sometimes stared at the sea.

I then had another glass of wine.

And then another.

As I did it, I realized I liked doing it, reading, sipping, staring at the sea. So much so, I didn’t think to have dinner.

And finally, I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up there hours later, I didn’t do what I would have done simply because my mother would decree it wasn’t appropriate to sleep in your clothes on your couch.

I didn’t drag myself to bed.

Instead, I closed my eyes and went back to sleep in my clothes on my couch.