In those moments, loneliness imposes temporary amnesia. How did I end up here? Had I lectured myself into some smug and quarantined state of solitude? Was living alone analogous to the emotional moat I construct around myself whenever I listen to one song on repeat, again and again?
Becoming is precarious terrain, and in spending so much time on my own, I had perhaps developed in solitude an acute distrust of myself. Seeking, I’ve since learned, is okay. How many women, I wonder, caught off guard by an unexpected stream of tears, have walked to their bathrooms and glanced at their faces in the mirror? A brief audit: dewy eyes, flush cheeks, damp and darkened bottom lashes that cling like starfish legs, but mostly the way my face, shook by what is happening, to the daze of unforeseen peril, finds solace in all the inexplicables that on some days come at me with suggestive force. I am a daughter, I remember, with parents whom I can call. I was once someone’s girlfriend for those formative girlhood-spun-sovereign years, so that’s surely something I’ve carried. What else?
I tend to forget or, rather, rarely cash in on the proximity of people. If I wanted, I could walk a few blocks and find a friend, a friend who is likely experiencing coincidental gloom, because if there’s one thing I know to be true about New York friendships: they are intervened time and again by emotional kismet. Stupid, unprecedented quantities of it. We’re all just here, bungling this imitation of life, finding new ways of becoming old friends.
6.
There’s a painting by one of my favorite artists, the Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson, titled Leftovers. In it, a woman is depicted living in her apartment, occupying the space in five separate moments of time. Sleeping. Dressing or showering, it’s hard to tell. Sleeping once more. Washing her face. Going out. The space has the meticulously worn character of a stage: set-designed attributes like a lone chair, blouses flopped on a coffee table, and the miniature dollhouse-like synthesis of square footage. In this way, Leftovers reminds me of my apartment. A collection of stuff, all hers.
Parsing Andersson’s painting was, for one summer, a pastime of mine because I had chosen it as my laptop wallpaper. Staring intently at this anonymous woman’s space, her camel coat and mustard floor lamp, her bathroom sink—too low, as most bathroom sinks are—I began to endow her anonymity with qualities of my own. These are the games we play as women because, since birth, interior spaces have been sacred; have been where we imagine furniture mounted on ceilings or marvel at the weight of curtains and fabricate for fun what lies behind them.
Perhaps she too leans against her kitchen sink in the morning as she sips coffee, worrying without right about everything, or cruelly and quite shamefully envisioning the funeral of someone she loves. Perhaps in living alone, she, like me, experiences self-voyeurism, self-narration, self-spectatorship more sharply than ever before. Doing domestic things like the dishes or dumb young things like ordering takeout while perhaps still drunk the next morning. Both versions of me, since living alone, have settled into a one-woman show that I star in and attend, that I produce and buy a ticket for, but sometimes fail to show up to because, as it happens, living alone has only further indulged the woman—me—who cancels a plan to stay in and excitedly ad-libs doing nothing at all.
And yet, I’ll still attempt pursuing these delusions in spite of reality’s firm hand, in spite of that which keeps us indoors: money, panic, books that lay in piles near my Nikes, books I absentmindedly begin reading instead of tying my laces and walking out the door.
7.
The first thing I ate in 2015 was a pear my friend Katherine left at my place on Christmas Eve. The pear, brown and stout as if missing its neck, was a pear unused, spared from a dessert she had prepared for dinner that night. Something with cinnamon and whiskey and perhaps another ingredient. Lemon juice? Before leaving, she placed the brave little stray on a shelf in my fridge. It sat there for seven days and eight nights, wrapped in a plastic bag that clung to its coarse skin as if suffocating it. Pears, I thought whenever I’d open my fridge during those haphazard days that wane between Christmas and New Year’s. Pears should never be wrapped in plastic. Paper, I concluded, is what suits.
It’s likely this notion has something to do with The Godfather, the second one, because one of my favorite scenes in the trilogy occurs moments after Vito Corleone has unfairly lost his job yet still returns home to Carmela carrying a pear wrapped in newspaper. He gently places the gift on their table while she busies herself in the kitchen, and in those few seconds I’ve always been taken by what I can only describe as the privacy of kindness. Those moments leading up to—that anticipate—the testimony of kindness. Kindness before it has been felt, before it, by nature of its mutual construction, even exists. Kindness at its clearest.
On New Year’s morning, I woke up and placed a cutting board on my stovetop and sliced Katherine’s pear in four fat slices that I then halved so as to begin the year with a sense of plenty. I stood at my counter and ate each piece as if I had intended to do so all along, as if I had waited all of 2014 to eat that pear.
That’s the thing about living alone. Artificial intention blurs with real intention, and sooner or later, more choices than not—like eating a pear first thing in the New Year—seem decisive, so much so that even a pear can deliver purpose, and if you’re lucky, peace of mind too.
10
Tan Lines
COME summer, my reluctance kicks in. It’s as if the sheer persistence of a July day—the sun’s glare, its flecked appraisal of pavement and trees, those bonus evening hours—solicits from me an essential need to withdraw. Thankfully, writing is an indoor sport. Sometimes I go stretches of days without much sun, and even in the swell of midsummer I maintain what could be characterized as my winter pallor. Though pallor might not be accurate. How might I describe my brownness, my very fair brownness, that following winter appears even more fair? What’s the opposite of glowing? Dull? Drab? Run-down? Blah?