The kids have eggs or baked beans on toast for dinner, I stay up late on the PlayStation and the lawn doesn't get mowed.
Also, things stay more or less where I put them. More or less.
Take our bed, for example.
When he's away, I sleep neatly in my own side of the bed, and his side remains virtually undisturbed, cushions and all. I get up in the morning, smooth up my sheet/doona, and replace my pillows. That's it. Our room is always tidy. The bathroom is neat and dry.
When Fabio comes home, he's like a cyclone. He himself is all calm and happy but all around him is chaos.
He drops all his clothes (and possibly shoes) at the side of the bed, and throws all the cushions off the bed, any old where. He climbs in and the first thing he does is throw his feet up so all the sheets come untucked at the bottom, and then fusses over his pillows, deciding which one he'll sleep on tonight. The unwanted ones get tossed onto the floor.
He rustles around all night and somehow the doona always ends up half-slithered off the foot of the bed or on one side, so that one person is shivering under the sheet hem, and the other person has a whole doona bunched around their neck.
I have to completely strip and re-make the bed every day when he's home.
The bathroom has wet towels hung higgledy-piggledy, the top of the shower screen is booby-trapped with toothbrush, toothpaste and a very large, heavy bottle of shower-gel. The floor mat is soaked and scrunched into a ball on the floor. And the door stays closed to keep in all the moisture and the heavy cloud of spray-on deodorant.
He spreads newspapers all round his chair, and leaves coffee-cups in his office. He seems to be physically incapable of putting the coffee and sugar canisters back into their proper spots.
I lose control of the Wand of Power and have to suffer through incessant channel surfing or sudden volume changes.
(this is not us - but it could be.)
Yes, when he's away, things are very different.
Quiet.
Tidy.
And so, so lonely.
