3 - 1 = 2

It's a week since the lad departed for art college and I am now able to go into his room or find an odd sock of his under the sofa and not feel sentimental - too much anyway.
The first few days were not unlike being dumped after love has gone astray, and I don't mean that in a weird way! But after listening to a Ted Talk about love and the brain, it does make sense. The     'hippocampus' (still can only see a large grey lumbering mammal wandering around a university grounds on seeing this word) deals with all this emotion stuff and when the love object is removed the 'hippo' part of the brain increases the desire and longing to see them constantly. Of course the difference is that he still seems to like us, will return home and we will, hopefully, slot back into all the stuff we usually do as a family, rather than the 'being discarded by a lover' situation - unlikely to ever see them again apart from odd furtive glances behind the cheese section in the supermarket if you are still live in the vicinity of each other.
So what have we learned and discovered?
I still like Mark (husband) a lot (phew) and he, me. Good. The bathroom stays clean. I am becoming aware that there is actually more time available, in fact several friends after listening to my pathetic sighing about absence of lad said 'Freedom!' and, 'just give it a couple of weeks and you'll be VERY happy with just you two'.
I don't know, but I think about him a lot, wonder what he might be doing at various parts of the day. But then I do that a lot about family and friends anyway - I wonder what Katherine might be doing now, or Mark, or Rosemary, or Penny, or Jo, or you, dear reader. Are you sitting with laptop, cup of tea and pile of things you should be doing nearby?
Fascinating that, isn't it . . . imagining everyone you know engaged in all these different things we all do all the time: eating, walking, driving, thinking, queuing . . . but then if we were telepathic, we'd all know what we were all doing all of the time. Social media would be even more exhausting.
My current novel, at the moment called Brassica, features a clan of people from some future Earth time who are telepathic, have more or less forgotten how to speak but are having to converse with my main character, 'Hamish', who has arrived from 1992.
How did I get onto this. Anyway, the point being, my brain is no longer solely occupied with 'is the lad okay, or not'. Onward.

                                        

The Hippocampus, which is actually Greek for Seahorse, not large grey, university-haunting mammal