I wish I could sleep more. I have been waking up after 6.5 hours and I can’t get back to sleep. That’s when I would go wake Noah up to put me back to sleep. But Noah is gone. Instead I wander out to the studio and scream/sob for hours. It’s so hard to think about moving forward with life but I do it anyway.

Because I am me and I’ve been single for about 10 minutes in my whole life I am dating. I was trying to find casual sex that would turn into a friendship and not much more. That isn’t going to plan. Mostly people didn’t turn into friends. One of the guys is trying but we haven’t managed a hang out yet. Another one is very friendly when I see him in town and that’s mildly awkward for me.

I feel like I am a fairly hideous person for being in a relationship at this point. I would say that Noah is rolling in his grave only he’s in a box in my room so that can’t happen. I have never been the type to sit alone and cry without moving forward. Life has to keep moving. The main way I acquire access to energy is sex. If I want to be energetic and cheerful for my kids (and I do) then I need sex. It’s not really optional for me. I feel bad about this. Noah wouldn’t be hunting at this point. He would be a lot less functional than I am. I agree with the kids that he would have gone off the rails entirely. He lived for serving me. He might be doing better with the lawyers but he would not be ok. It would be like the road trip where he shut down and didn’t see friends or do much that was fun that wasn’t centered on me. Noah didn’t want to live without me.

It’s wild going through Noah’s Dropbox. His obsession with me was pretty epic. The notes he took on our interactions over 20 years are daunting as fuck. He wrote a book on me in terms of number of words. It’s a really long book. I can go back through the layers of contracts we wrote together. I can see how Noah evaluated himself as a husband and father week by week for decades.

I keep wondering if I want to delete any of his files or if they will sit in the ether forever as a mausoleum. It’s fascinating going through and looking how he organised his brain. He has so many old files. I’ve got to say that it is shocking to me how much I was part of every thought he had. I’m going through sections that are ostensibly about jobs. In the middle of a bunch of old notes about job hunting and tech stuff there are long essays about how Noah felt about me and our marriage. I have so many years of his feelings to read whenever I want. This is just the stuff I can read in Dropbox. He has so much more on his computer. Reading it is hard.

He loved me so much.

I feel like I am drowning in sadness but that’s not fair. The kids need me to get up and be active. They need me to be effective and supportive and gentle and loving.

Throughout our whole marriage we would both get to points where what we knew/could carry wasn’t enough. Every time we would get mad and say something to the effect of, “Why is the answer always ‘Then you need to get stronger’?” We never ran out of issues and problems. We were never good enough for everything we needed to do. We always had to keep getting stronger. Life wasn’t going to get easier; we needed to be able to do more. He took that so seriously. I can see the evidence of him working hard to be better year after year. He never stopped.

Until he stopped. Now I wake up and reach for him in the night and cry because I will never touch him again.

It’s good that the man I’m dating is getting the strong impression that he has to get over comparisons between him and other people I date. I’m never going to be monogamous again. It’s simply not on offer to anyone else. It was brutally hard with Noah and I’m not going to sign on for that much feeling like a piece of shit ever again. I like sex. I like sex fairly casually with people I barely know. I’m not ok with someone being mean to me because of how much I want sex. I need to have agreements that allow for me being me in ways I was not allowed to negotiate with Noah. No more veto power.

I want to communicate about my sex life, of course. I care a lot about everyone’s physical health. I am not going to take risks that harm people I love if there is any way to avoid it. I will talk about what I am doing and when and I am open to negotiations about degrees of risks.

I broke Noah’s heart a long time ago when he saw me consider the possibility of dating after his death. I feel like I am a horrible person. I also feel like I have a lot of work to do and I don’t know a way to get enough energy other than sex. Sex keeps me motivated to stay alive in a way that nothing else does. I’m going to have sex and I don’t want to be shamed for it.