I was the woman whose shoulders are too bony to lean on but whose thighs have cushioned his naps in that hour on Sunday before dinner when the hangover has worn off and the sleepy sets in.
All of these relationships, crucial as they were and are, accelerate involuntarily. Being Someone’s Someone is cozy in theory—a snug image like two letter Ss fitting where the convex meets its concave. Unfortunately, I felt little of that snugness. I’d sculpted myself into what feels nearest to apparatus, a piece of equipment that was increasingly capable of delaying my desires. There was always tomorrow, I told myself. There was always next semester, or spring, or the uncanny extent of a summer day. Or winter. Or winter, she says. The most fictional of seasons because winter is lit for the most part with lamps and candles and, in some cases, the arbitrary oranges of a fireplace instead of the natural brightness, say, of the sun. Winter’s wheaty indoor amber glow emboldens the bluesiest approach to oneself, which is by nature the easiest to deny. But repudiating the would-be is a quality that many women can attest to no matter the season, because from a very young age we were never young.
I can wiggle my way into small spaces. I’m more flexible than I appear. I sleep in the fetal position. I do everything in my power to stifle a second sneeze, and if that fails, I apologize mid-sneeze. Because I have a low pain threshold, I seem to have developed, as a reaction, a high tolerance for the swell and plummet of other people’s moods. And so I whittled myself away because—and this is where as a writer I duck and cover—I’ve been for most of my life confusing the meaning of words. I’ve confused privacy with keeping secrets, for example, and caring with giving.
3.
In the past my response to conflict was, by some means, bogus math. Prescriptive as though the advent of apology was, I was convinced, my first move. Figuring myself into the equation would come second because I had disciplined my definition of “relationship” into rationale. Ensure he feels proud of his work before you can focus on yours. Read little into what she said last night; she’s having a hard time. Listen. Listen better. Master listening.
But living alone is the reverse of mastery. It’s scuttling around in surrender while hoping you don’t stub your toe, because living alone is also a series of indignities like bouncing around on one foot, writhing in pain. Living alone is an elaborately clumsy wisening up.
Since moving into this apartment on the fourth floor of a building just one street over from my previous place, I regularly trip over things: shoes, computer cables, the leg of a chair, and of course, ghost things too strike. Just yesterday I placed a clean pot back on the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet only to have it slide back out and conk me on the head with such aggression that when I yelled FUCK, everything went silent: my buzzing fridge, the patter of rain on my air-conditioning unit, the slow and sped-up metronomic tick that resides inside of me and competes with my heartbeat for what really compels me. Any vain attempt to expect jokiness, for instance, from a pot that mysteriously falls on my head no longer exists. Since living alone, grievances occur in silence. Deep and shallow thoughts court and compose me like deep and shallow breaths.
4.
As someone whose central momentum is having connected, similar to the high of having written, my life before living alone was, to exaggerate, one very long practice session. I’d been avoiding myself with such ease that even when an obstacle presented itself—like the pained limits of a friendship that had run its course—my response was to adapt around it the way we circle street construction on our way to the subway without much thought, as if the ball and sockets of our hip joints, anticipating those orange pylons, swerve so as to save our distracted selves from falling into crater-sized holes.
Avoidance can be elegant, certainly, because elegance, like restraint, is a spectacle that assuages. Even the word—avoidance—smooth as if meant solely for cursive’s sleek lines; a speedy unthinking gesture like one’s signature.
Edmund White once wrote about Marguerite Duras in The New York Review of Books: “Her work was fueled by her obsessive interest in her own story and her knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event.” In less than thirty words, a tally of four hers.
I count living alone as, in a manner of speaking, finding interest in my own story, of prospering, of creating a space where I repeat the same actions every day, whetting them, rearranging them, starting from scratch but with variables I can control or, conversely, eagerly appeal to their chaos. I can approximate what time it is on sunny mornings by glancing at the frontiered shadow that darkens on the building adjacent to mine, casting a crisp line that cuts the building’s sandy-yellow brick, lowering notch by notch as quarter past six all of a sudden becomes seven. It takes me fourteen steps from my bed to my bookshelves and nine steps to walk from my front door to the globe lamp I’ve propped on a stool under a wall I’ve half decorated, of which a poster I’ve framed hangs asymmetrically next to nothing more than blank white wall. That globe lamp is the first light I turn on when I return home. For nine steps when I walk in at night, after shutting my front door and placing my keys on their hook, I navigate the slumbered mauve and moonlit darkness of my space. It welcomes me, the darkness.
5.
Living alone, I’ve described to friends, is like waking up on a Saturday and realizing it’s Saturday. That made-up sense of repartee with time. Abundance felt from sitting upright in bed; the weight of one’s duvet vanquishing, by some means, all accountability. Rarely traveling for half of last year and staying in my new place all to my own was similar to the emotional pluck those first few sips of red wine supply, or from riding the subway after seeing a movie; riding it the length of the city only to forget that this train rises aboveground as it crosses the East River, suddenly washing my face with sunlight or, in the evening, apprising my reflection in the train’s window with the tinsel of Manhattan’s skyline.
Precision of self was a quality I once strived for, but since living alone, clarity, I’ve learned—when it comes—furnishes me with that thing we call boldness. Self-imposed solitude developed in me, as White wrote about Duras, a knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event. Living alone, I soon caught on, is a form of self-portraiture, of retracing the same lines over and over—of becoming.
There’s just one problem. Nothing catches me off guard quite like suddenly—sometimes madly—seeking the company of someone else.