Eric is packing for his move, and there are moving boxes in half the rooms, and I feel like I’m in the way wherever I am, while in reality of course it’s the boxes being in the way. And I just feel so done with this. I am counting down days until this is over. Except there is no fixed date, it’s “just after New Year’s”, so I don’t even know.

I try to read or knit and I keep getting interrupted. I want to use the Christmas break to do something actually relaxing or fun, but there is no room for fun and no peace and quiet to be had, so this feels like the worst and most wasted Christmas break ever. And it’s +8°C and a drizzle out there, to top it all off.

I am breathing my way through the days. I am annoyed by things that would normally not bother me the least, and I resent the heck out of the situation.

What a difference love makes. And how obvious it is that love is an active choice more than a feeling that just happens. When I actively chose to love Eric, if there was some little thing he did that could be perceived as annoying, I could decide to not view it as such. I loved him, and he had his foibles, and ignoring those foibles was a part of loving him. And they truly did not annoy me, because in the grand scheme of things, they were nothing. Leaves the toilet lid up when flushing? Puts apples in the fruit bowl without rinsing them? Cuts up everything on his dinner plate so he can shovel it all up with just a fork? It was nothing.

Now it is not nothing.