Whining, Wine-ing & Winning

I misunderstood the rules. I just needed 20 minutes to myself.

After consuming two breakfast burritos and enjoying the beautiful weather, I decided I needed a break. Not in a dramatic way. Just in a “I wonder if anyone would notice if I disappeared for ten minutes” kind of way. So naturally, I climbed into the closet. I don’t know why. I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t hiding from danger. I was just playing hide and seek. The problem was nobody else knew we were playing.

My husband was living his life unaware that his wife had gone feral and was sitting between coats and man shoes like some kind of middle-aged freak. Soon I heard, “Babe?” I stayed quiet. Then came, “Baaaaaabe?” At this point I was trying not to laugh. Next came, “LINDSAY?” Things were escalating. Poor guy started wandering around the house while I sat in the dark reading blog comments and laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Then my phone rang. Not a text. An actual phone call. From the man standing twenty feet away. I couldn’t answer because I was laughing too hard. Then I heard him ask, “Did she go for a walk? How do people just disappear?” A few minutes later came the line that broke me.

“I’m so confused.”

I was still sitting in the closet, two breakfast burritos deep, trying not to pee my pants laughing. Then came more phone calls. Eventually I realized I should probably come out before he called the cops. Unfortunately, he chose that exact moment to go to the bathroom. After spending twenty minutes searching for his missing wife and wondering where people disappear to, the poor man finally came out and looked at me with a mixture of confusion, relief, and irritation.

“WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU?”

“In the closet.”

“I was about to call the police! It wasn’t funny.”

Pause.

“You just thought it would be cute to hide for twenty minutes?”

That’s when I lost it…when you say it out loud, it sounds ridiculous. Which, to be fair, it was…that’s marriage. Not candlelit dinners. Not long walks on the beach. One person conducting a missing persons investigation while the other sits in a closet laughing like a psychopath because she thought disappearing for twenty minutes would be therapeutic.