A LIKELY STORY: RETURN TO TEMPORARY BACHELORHOOD NO EASY TASK

Living alone isn't as easy as I remember it. I remember hanging out with friends, shooting pool and watching whatever I wanted on TV. Apparently, there's a lot more to it than that.

On Sunday, I stood in the rain and watched my wife leave, pulling out of the driveway and out of my life. It's the first time I've lived alone since my marriage a scant four months ago.

I felt like writing a she-done-gone-and-left-me country song, but I doubt I would get any sympathy for having to be away from Lori for four weeks while she does a medical rotation in a Jefferson City hospital. Besides, she is going to be home on weekends.

Many married people consider this a full-time way of life. I know a couple who have jobs in different cities and the weekends are their only time together. They might scoff at my brief dilemma.

But I didn't think of that then. True to my strong melodramatic nature, I remember thinking this must be how the spouses of soldiers from various wars must have felt as they watched their husbands (and more recently, wives) leave for foreign shores.

I stood there for a long minute, wondering how I would get by without her and what I should do now. And then a voice told me: "Get out of the rain, stupid, you're getting wet." The voice turned out to belong to my neighbor, who had been watching me stand in the rain for 15 minutes.

Normally Lori tells me things like that.

A particularly sensitive friend of mine told me her leaving shouldn't be that hard on me: "You've only been married four months. You couldn't have been that attached to her."

The sadness didn't last long, however. Soon, the melancholy departed and was replaced by an emotion much more unsettling -- panic.

Right before my very eyes, the apartment began to change as I sat helpless. Piles of clothes begin to appear on the bedroom floor. Dishes filled the sink, many of them with food still desperately clinging to them. Books magically appeared on the couch as gravity pulled the couch cover down and to the floor.

When I got back from work, someone had left the milk out and hadn't turned the coffee pot off. I remembered taking the trash out, but not only had someone brought it back in, they had turned the can over and let the trash ooze out onto the floor.

Lori left a clean apartment 48 hours ago. If she were to come home today, she'd probably think she entered the wrong apartment instead of the one she keeps meticulously tidy.

I never knew how hard it is to keep a place clean. She has complained that I don't exactly do my share of the housework and I had been making a half-hearted attempt to before she left.

But I didn't realize how much she does, how many jobs she takes care of while I'm busy napping or watching reruns of "The X Files."

And that's not all she does. And now I had to do those things, too. In my mind, I went over the little meeting we had an hour before she left: "Here's the checkbook," she said. "We have X amount of money so try not to spend it all."

"We have a checking account?"

She also told me that we had been getting bills -- I think that's what they're called -- in the mail and now I would be responsible for paying them. Who knew?

It's going to be a long four weeks.

~Scott Moyers is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.