so steady as she goes (are you steadynow?)

so this morning when i woke up i got that sinking feeling in my stomach. my response? clean everything. everything i own is clean: my apartment, car, clothes. even the refrigerator. and then i went grocery shopping. and i decided that although i genuinely love grocery shopping, it's not particularly conducive to being single.

the minute you walk in the door the size of your shopping cart must be selected. now i'm not sure when exactly this happened (although it was probably just in time for me to become single), but there are now what i like to call "single people carts". these are a necessary evil for the shopper who can't quite fill up the smaller carts and who really doesn't feel like carrying a basket either. the single shopper cart, this is the one i select. so i walk into the store and since i've been eating a lot of spinach lately so i though i'd pick up a bag. now, there are about 15 different bags of spinach to choose from and there are various prices. i'd like to pick the most economical bag of spinach because the only consistency in my life is that i'm poor. but in that case i have to buy mass quantities of spinach that will just rot in my refrigerator and make me clean it out later. so i buy the smaller bag for maybe 50 cents cheaper. then i decide i'd like some salmon because i've been on this health kick lately and it's good for me. so i wait maybe 2 minutes at the counter (which is actually a long time in wegmans), probably because the man can't see me over the display, and i order a salmon filet. "just one?" he asks and smiles, knowingly. he might as well just had said, "oh right, you're single!", with a grimace on his face and a wedding band on his finger. i finished up my shopping with the utmost concern as to how much i was spending (which, seriously, is always more of a concern when you're single) and trying to avoid having my heels run over by the moms with their large carts so full they can't even see over the top of them.

this is all incredibly petty, i realize this. and i really do like to grocery shop, i just liked it better when adam and i were living together. there was a routine, sunday evenings we went grocery shopping. we ate sushi first. we used the medium cart and took turns pushing. we conspired about what we were going to cook that week. all kinds of extravagant things that i would almost never cook just for myself (take today, for example, i had bread and cheese. and juice, if that counts). then he'd get the car and pull it up and we'd take everything home and climb the 3 flights of stairs to our apartment in buffalo, and trying to do it all in one trip at that. and then we put everything away, together.

now, don't get me wrong, this does not mean i miss adam. i truly do not. but i do miss the companionship we had. it made home feel so full, that bond. that's what i miss. and i'm sure i will have it again at some point. but that's the distant future. even if i did have a boyfriend we still wouldn't have that bond. things in new relationships are just too tumultuous for that kind of thing. it doesn't really make me sad because i'm pretty good at being single too. it was just such a good feeling. i think that if you can really enjoy grocery shopping with someone at the same time every week then you must be on to something.