Tonight I sit on my couch with a half-flamed fire in the fireplace, alone. I've just finished a thrown-together dinner -- simple sauteed pork chop, leftover black beans, sauteed white onions with tomatoes -- made from a handful of groceries I picked up just an hour ago at the Whole Foods on Ashland Avenue. I spent the day with my mom. Lunch at Flo, a little shopping at the shoe store next door, a trip up Milwaukee Avenue to Max Gerber to check out affordable kitchen sinks. Afterwards we went back to her place and made a couple of decaf cappuccinos before heading out to the Boyd Gallery on Wells for the opening of their newest show, a collection of square canvases by an Italian abstract painter. Painted on the canvases were different shades of the same color, like white and white and white or black and black and black or blue and blue and blue. All of the colors were in squares or rectangles and were differentiated by texture, not just tone, like rough and smooth and some with brush strokes and some with none. At the gallery I talked to several people about how much better free internet phoning is than any phoning that's not free and how hard it is to paint black oil enamel over kitchen cabinets and how, miraculously, one writer's house across the road from Delgado Community College got only an inch or two of water and no real damage at all. I don't know this writer. My writer friend whose house is close to Delgado got several feet of water, I found out today, which meant the loss of over 350 books. It was like losing 350 family photographs because each book had a story and a place and a time it was associated with, though most (not all) can be replaced, unlike photographs. He and his wife are in Santa Fe because they still can't live in their water-logged house, their house without those 350 books.

My mom and I were to meet her boyfriend Howard at the gallery then go to dinner. But when he got there, after I'd talked with those several people for an hour, maybe more, and when we left the gallery and were walking toward the car, I had this overwhelming desire to leave and get home to be alone. The last thing on earth I wanted to do, suddenly, was go out to dinner with the two of them.

So now here I am: alone on the couch with my half-flamed fire and my thrown-together dinner cooked from a handful of groceries I picked up at the Whole Foods on Ashland. It's one of the saddest ironies that depression brought upon by loneliness makes you want to be alone.

It's not that I didn't see my abrupt departure coming. All day I was grumpy. I was quick to tear up. Over lunch, I found myself weepy over our uncertain financial future, over the house, and mostly over the fact that I feel like my writing is going nowhere and even the blog I find no purpose in at all most days.

I am, again, completely irrational, and I know it. That should make me feel better, in theory, but instead it makes me feel worse. I ought to be able to do something about it if I can see it for what it is. This irrationality is cyclical, but it's not connected to the cycles of the moon or of the waves or even of the sun. It's not even connected to when I speak to S (though it most certainly is connected to the fact that he's in Afghanistan and not here next to me in front of this half-flamed fire). I talked to him this morning via Skype for fifteen minutes, maybe more, about the beastiality some of his ANA troops participated in this past week (and no, I'm not joking), about how he blinked and blinked while boxing a guy on base (it's been a few years since he last sparred), and how today was "Fuck Off Friday," the Afghan equivalent of our Sunday, a day of rest and of doing-whatever-you-damn-well-please. I talked to him this morning and still I spent the day feeling out of control and irrational. It's the cycles within my heart that move from deep in the crater and out again, over and over without end.

The insecurity over my writing came up when my mother told me she showed the post I wrote about nanotechnology and Carmen and green building and passion to Howard and how Howard had forwarded it to Chuck. Suddenly I felt a twinge of panic. Did I write something offensive? What the hell is wrong with me writing about people I know and posting it to a public blog? Even conversations? And, worse, why did I feel so betrayed when she told me this?

I've had a hard time being around my mom and Howard these past few weeks and I've tried to figure out why. I've wondered if I'm jealous or if I miss having my mother to myself. I've wondered if it is that when I'm with them, a couple, and without S, I'm therefore not a couple. I've wondered if it is that I'm sick of being around my mom's friends because I have no friends of my own here in Chicago after being gone so long, except for a couple who I hardly ever see and none of them are writers. In New Orleans I had friends, a lot of friends, and I had S. I had the poetry group and I had our roommate Rebecca, and I had S. Now New Orleans is a flooded wreck of what it was. The poetry group is scattered and I haven't even talked to any of them in weeks, and Rebecca is in Nigeria, and I haven't talked to her in weeks either. And, of course, S is still in Afghanistan, still away from me, and I know I feel his absence more acutely now because we spent those two weeks together and they were such good weeks. We're still not pregnant and we're still not parents. It's only the last two days that I haven't felt completely exhausted.

On my drive to my mom's place this afternoon I passed two trees on Lake Shore Drive that looked to have been dipped in red candy, the kind candied apples are dipped in. Just the leaves at the tops of the trees were red while the rest were still green. I didn't think there would be much fall color this year because our summer was so dry and so hot, but I was wrong. The city is goldenrod and ochre now with hints of chartreuse and crimson, though that is most rare. So many of the old trees have died the past decade -- oaks, elms, maples, hickories -- from foreign bugs and diseases, and they've been replaced with these thin-trunked Kentucky Coffees and others similar that have groups of petite, diamond-shaped leaves rather than the hand-sized, star-shaped leaves of the maples or the Dadaesque leaves of the elms. These new trees turn yellow and nothing else.

It is, I know, impossible to lessen this loneliness through activity because though I miss my friends and even that crawling, stinky city, I really only miss S. It's his absence that I feel most, and it's his absence that I can do absolutely nothing about. Which is why this loneliness is so irrational.

I'm writing every day. I'm applying for work. I'm getting the house together. I'm not exercising or meditating or doing yoga or any of the other things I know I should, but I am reading and I'm reading good books. I'm eating right and I'm trying to dress appropriately so I can avoid getting that deep chill I had last spring when I first came back from New Orleans, when I felt cold even if the temperature outside was in the upper 60s. I'm leading a workshop for NWA at a library in Uptown (it's all mine starting next week) and I'm writing, every day, even if I think it's all a bunch of crap. None of it seems to matter.

By the sliding glass doors at the Whole Foods on Ashland was a pink paper flyer: "Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy." I'm not the only lonely heart in town, I guess. But tonight in front of this half-flamed fire that doesn't matter either.