How am I?

Every time someone asks me that question, I say, "I'm fine, thank you," but to be honest, I'm not.

Do people really want to know how you feel when they ask how are you? Or are they just trying to be polite?

The next time the woman across the road from my apartment says to me, 'how are you?' I'm going to say to her:

"Well, actually, I'm not very well at all, thank you. I'm feeling a bit depressed and lonely. Pissed off at the world. Envious of you and your perfect little family but not particularly envious of your husband for having to live with you."

And then I'll tell her about how I started a new job and met lots of new people and how I'm trying hard to pick myself up but that I'm now at a loss about what else to do.

Then I'll tell her how it pisses me off when everyone says time is a healer when at the same time they also say absence makes the heart grow fonder, which really confuses me because that means that the longer he's gone the more I want him.

I'll tell her that nothing is healing at all and that every morning I wake up in my empty bed it feels like salt is being rubbed into those unhealing wounds.

And then I'll tell her about how much I miss my partner and about how worthless my life seems without him. How uninterested I am in getting on with things without him, and I'll explain how I feel like I'm just waiting for my world to end so that I can join him.

She'll probably just say, "Oh that's good," like she always does, kiss her husband good-bye, hop into her car, and drop her kids at school, go to work, make the dinner and eat the dinner, and go to bed with her husband and she'll have it all done while I'm still trying to decide what color shirt to wear to work.

What do you think?

Sigh... life... it's messy... (at least mine is)