What I like about you

"What I like about you / you keep me warm at night / never wanna let you go / you make me feel all right / Whisper in my ear / tell me all the things that I wanna hear /'cause it's true / that's what I like about you" - The Romantics

I tend to watch TV shows in spurts - I watch all my TV online, by the way, so I can watch a whole season in a week or so, gorging myself on whatever I'm in the mood for. Like reading book after book of a series.

When I logged on a few weeks ago, I saw nothing good on hulu (NBC and ABC's official web-vision) or CBS.com, so I went over to SyFy's webpage to see what they had to offer. The Sci-Fi channel, which, yes, actually changed their name to SyFy, shows a small selection of full episodes on their webpage. So I saw ads for "being human", one of their summer series about a ghost, werewolf, and vampire that live together. I watched the first episode, and it was good enough that I watched the second, and the third, and kept on watching.

The moment I liked best from the pilot: when Sally the ghost appeared and asked the roommates: "So, are you gonna go all Twilight on each other or what?" And Josh, the werewolf, did his best "innocent/confused" face and asked, "What? We don't know what you're talking about."

But since then, the show has been increasingly horrific, as in "horror-ific", culminating in the episode I just watched (season 1, episode 9) when Aiden's vampire girlfriend turned a dying boy who'd been struck by a car, because his death was making Aiden sad, and this was the only way the boy would live. He was only a kid, though, and had no impulse control, and thought he could be like a superhero if he only killed "bad guys", like the bullies at school. So, in the blink of an eye, two more boys die young deaths. And that's not even the worst scene in the episode.

So, as I'm watching this show that's making me all squirmy inside, two things occur to me as particularly strange. The first is, I keep watching. Despite the fact that horror is really not my thing, I keep watching. And the second strange thing that occurs to me is that I miss Michael.

Now, since my separation and divorce, I have missed having a husband, and I have missed being married, and I have missed having a live-in handyman and babysitter and having a best friend who was all of those things that I needed him to be. But I can make other friends, and hire babysitters and contractors who are better at their jobs than he ever was. I can date other men, or even get married again. The "position" of husband is replacable. The strange thing is that after three years of divorce I found I still missed Michael.

Michael and I liked movies, albeit we had differing tastes. He tended more toward horror and adventure and I more toward fantasy and comedy, but we overlapped neatly in Sci-Fi. You name it, we've seen it. If not together, then separately, and then comparing notes, and then together. Independence Day was a particular favorite of mine. As was Jurassic Park, and The Princess Bride. But hey, who DOESN'T love The Princess Bride? His favorites included the Alien series, In the Mouth of Madness, and anything George Lucas ever did. But he had a small "vampire" collection, including From Dusk Til Dawn, John Carpenter's Vampires, and the Blade series (all of which we watched together).

Watching horror by myself, especially vampire horror, just didn't feel right.

And so I find that I miss Michael. Yes, I miss watching horror movies with him, and cajoling him into watching comedies. But I miss Michael. Our love was easy. I miss talking with him, late into the night. I miss his smile and his embraces and his intense knowledge of all things Star Wars. I miss buying him presents just to see him smile. I miss his point of view and his minor obsessions and just being there for him, even when it wasn't easy.