The life partner and I are having an ongoing fight interspersed with listening to music in separate rooms. What happened, you ask? He tried to handle a medical bill three months after I first began asking him to do so. He insisted it wasn’t urgent and was feisty in a bad way every time I brought it up.

As a result, a couple of weeks ago, I almost got put into collections by the hospital and had to pay the bill in full before I could be seen by my immunologist.

But that’s not what the fight’s about because my window of tolerance for the life partner is larger than he could ever imagine.

The fight is about the fact that he caught a wild anxiety this morning, which happens from time to time, and called the insurance company to figure out why the claim had been rejected. He got in way over his head and couldn’t even identify the correct claim, which made the conversation with the representative go south fast.

He burst, I tell you burst, into my room in a panic with his phone in his hand and a tiny confused voice on the other end of the call, demanding that I help him immediately, which I did by taking over the entire situation and cutting him out of the conversation.

He’s trying to defend the indefensible. That’s what the fight is about. I hate it when our home becomes a series of fun-house mirrors reflecting anxiety and defensiveness, especially on a day when something good is actually happening in my life.

(I’m not sure the two phenomena are mutually exclusive. Any success I have seems to spike his anxiety and, somehow, his need to prove his worth through acting defensively toward me. Other things spike his anxiety, too, like The Rumproast in Chief, which means he’s been anxious about certain issues for a while now.)

What am I listening to? The Crystal Method, of course. I owe this band a debt of gratitude for getting my rear in gear where writing is concerned.