It’s Monday and Mondays generally mean I have no food in my house. After a weekend of hardly being in my apartment and about 12 days on vacation, this Monday is no exception. Grocery shopping is something I usually enjoy. For some reason, it relaxes me. I like to walk up and down the aisles when the market is not overly crowded and take my time. Most people would say this is crazy and I’m sure they’re correct to some degree. All the same, I have an innate domesticity that I can’t seem to nor want to abandon. When I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Galvin asked the class what each of us would like to be when we grew up. My answer was a housewife. I excelled at Home Economics and despite my good grades and fancy education, that fourth grade ambition has not necessarily changed.

Over the last few weeks, however, grocery shopping has lost its luster for me. The sheen is gone. It isn’t so much fun or relaxing for me. Cooking and shopping for one, which used to be something I was quite proud of as a mark of an independent, character building lifestyle has been an empty endeavor as of late. I recently acquired a boyfriend (recently being a little more than six months ago) and we spent a great deal of time together, probably too much time too quickly. We talked about moving in together and it seemed like a done deal. Then he changed his mind. He’s probably right — if we spend too much time together we start to drive one another crazy. Besides, he knows I love him and he knows he doesn’t love me (“Not right now,” anyway. “Not yet.”) So we broke up for about a week and then got back together, agreeing to take it more slowly and scrapping the move-in plans. It made sense at the time and it continues to make sense, I suppose.

But I don’t like it, not really. There’s part of me that would have liked to try — to jump in with both feet and see what happened. But the “feelings” thing is troubling to me and makes me think that I’d leave within a week of moving in. So I’m okay with it. I renewed my lease for a month to month deal and this weekend I’m going to Ikea to do some retail therapy. Pots, pans, plates, cups, that kind of thing.

But grocery shopping hasn’t been the knee-slapping good time it used to be. I’d been imagining now for the last three months that at this point, I’d be grocery shopping for two people and cooking dinner for two people. Inventing wild recipes and setting the table and using the nice plates. But now it’s back to buying and cooking for one — eating alone at a table set for one and using the ok plate. I’ve done it for years and I should be used to it, having never had roommates other than one very brief live-in boyfriend. But this time it’s a little hard to swallow. Today at the market there was a couple kissing in the sauces aisle. Usually I’ll see something like that and, happy that I have someone to do that with if I so wished, would be happy for them. But today I just wanted to reach between them for something I didn’t need just so I could scowl and murmur “get a room” under my breath. But I just kept on walking — over to the next aisle to retrieve my individual stir fry bowl. You can’t blame people for having something you don’t get to have, even though my boyfriend continues to tell me he “doesn’t know what’s going to happen.”

I’ll get over it, I always do. One day someone will want to sit at my table and eat off the good plates. I hope so anyway.