Thank you Kacey. I am glad my sharing with Belle touched you too. It has been 5 years for me and I still catch myself now and then. Even when he moved across the country I would daydream about him coming back to live with me when he retires in a few years. More and more I take the fantasy a step further and actually imagine it. OMG!! No thank you!! I am much better off on my own. Sure I would likely enjoy a certain warm fuzzy familiarity to it but there is so much I don't miss about him being in my life day in and day out.

For most of the last 5 years I have dreaded the day I would learn he had a girl friend. I would hear storied but if there were other woman then they were fleeting. He remains officially single. There was a time I wanted him to get a girlfriend just to force me to see that he had really moved on. A new woman would help me let go. So I thought.... except when I would feel the relief from learning a rumour was false.

Life is different when someone moves on and leaves you to live alone. It takes time to adjust to so many changes. Heart issues aside it takes time to get used to having so much time on your hands. Takes time to discover what it is like to make your own choices about everything all the time. Takes time for it to sink in that hey... I am my own person again. I can do this and I can do it well. I can do and go and be whatever, wherever and who ever I want. I get another kick at a new life. How cool is that. Now what do I want this new life to look like and how do I make it happen? I'll make the most of everyday working it forward on my own. I will give life to the dreams I had forgotten, pushed aside... not known I had until now. I will clear out the old and make way for the new.

Did you reclaim your living spaces? He preferred white or nearly white walls and soon after he left I painted walls the colours I had always wanted them to be. I rearranged furniture and did all sorts of things I couldn't do when he was here. It amazed me how much of my every day was patterned around him. Mealtimes, bedtimes, tv times, movie choices.... over the years he had some how managed to be the boss of me. Yuk! I would never have expected that of me. I never expected to be my mother's daughter when it came to catering to a man.

So for the first while of our break up for me it was about the freedom to do and go and be anything I wanted. Reclaiming myself. Now I am good with it. I can't imagine giving it all up again to accommodate a man in my life full time. At 56 there isn't the same romantic attraction to being in love, and married till death do you part and all of that. Not for me at least. Not to mention happy to do with out the potential heart ache again.