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“I’m going to die alone.” It’s a refrain often uttered by women, with a kind of tragicomic self-awareness, after a bad date or the breakup of a brief romance or the adoption of a calico cat. I can hardly count the rom-coms that hinge on this premise (a woman has resigned herself to a life of takeout, cheap Chardonnay, and quirky pajamas). But even said jokingly, the words are possessed of a horrible tyranny, as though aloneness is an island on which, as punishment for failing to successfully adapt yourself to romantic love, you are marooned. Alone is a place that nobody would want to go on vacation, much less live permanently.
It was December when we broke up, that kind of confusing weather where glaring sunlight makes the cold air feel even colder. We sat in our shared kitchen of nearly four years and quietly faced each other, acknowledging what nobody wanted to say. That obsessive connection had turned to blind devotion, and the blinders were coming off to reveal that we had evolved separately (the least shocking reason of all and perhaps the most common). That anger wasn’t sexy or sustainable. That our hearts were still broken from trying so hard to fix it but no longer uncertain about whether or not we could. The finality nearly killed me, and I remember muttering, “But what if we still went on dates?” He laughed sadly. “Whatever you want.”
But we knew there would be no dates, only the kind of loving but overly careful check-ins that define a separation after longtime togetherness, after hundreds upon hundreds of nights curled against each other in bed, after thousands of takeout boxes and millions of text messages and then the side-by-side texting, too, on the couch, under the dim blue light of the TV. Our home, a sprawling loft bought when we brimmed with shared plans for each room, was no longer a space of comfort. And it was hard, in this moment, to summon what it had been, what we had felt, the routines that defined and outlined our life as a couple.
The sound of the washing machine starting up without your having pressed the button, the days you get up first and the days that he does. The hours you lose to shared silence on a Sunday and the back and forth, back and forth to the bodega, taking turns or walking together in jackets either too light or heavy for the season (nobody in this house is in the habit of checking the weather). It is impossible, in the moment of separation, to access just how valuable each and every one of these mundane acts will seem in a week or a month or four months. You won’t lie in your new bed, your solitary bed, thinking of your first date on a rainy night in April or that first “I love you” after drinks at the Carlyle (each of us ordered scotch to impress the other; neither lightweight consumed it). Not the castle on the beach in Portugal or the ocean in the Maldives full of fish the color of lipstick. You won’t be stuck on the Technicolor memories but rather the odd, quiet details that proved, again and again, that you were definitely not alone. We made the mutual decision that he would keep our home (he’s always loved it fiercely, while I got anxiety in the elevator), and I would regroup at my parents’ place, ten minutes away by cab.
I used to love solitude. I considered it luxurious, a state in which fantasy and reality mixed and my world took on the mystical potency of a solstice gathering of nude witches. For this reason I hated summer camp, where the opportunities to be alone were scant. By age fourteen I was already pretty charmed by myself, and living for a month in a bunk of pubescent, writhing female life felt restrictive at best and repulsive at worst. One day a field trip was planned to a nearby water park, where we would all wear our green-and-white uniforms over our bathing suits and be closely watched as we splashed in the shallow end of a heavily urinated-in public water feature. No, thank you.
And so I did what any logical adolescent would do: I invented, with perfect symptomatic accuracy, a case of strep throat. Headache. Pain when swallowing. Vague chills. My case was airtight. They couldn’t question me until they got the swab back, which could take up to two days. And so I was quarantined on a cot in a corner in the nurse’s cabin, a place you went only if something had gone horribly awry. For a few hours she sat at her desk and I feigned feverish weakness until she announced that she was headed to lunch and would be back in an hour, the screen door slamming behind her as she waddled down the hill. And in that moment I realized that, for the first time in weeks, I was alone. The light was bright and dusty. I could feel the wind through the open window, and I released the expression of agony I’d been using as my disguise. I lay perfectly still, almost too delighted.
In high school my bedroom was a temple to personal space, the walls pasted completely with pictures (of Sylvia Plath and Jimmy Fallon, two very different but equally essential formative influences). On the walls I had scrawled images in lipstick of gaunt girls with big mouths and trees with extensive roots, and it never once occurred to me that this might be off-putting, maybe even send up a flare about my mental health. On a prehistoric laptop I typed doleful poems about the solitude I was actually relishing, and when I wasn’t inside I was walking in and out of various dollar stores—alone—to pick up crafting supplies (if you’ve never glued a bunch of plastic grapes to a $6 mirror, try it)! My independence was still novel, and every day felt like an opportunity to indulge in my own company, to soak in it like a bubble bath.
Then, at college, came my first serious relationship. He was a beautiful, anxious film student with a blond beard and a red bike. I was in awe of him and quickly installed myself like a light fixture in his bedroom. He was monkish in his sleep patterns, and I stayed up much of the night staring at him: He was here. He was mine. When he moved into an efficiency apartment off campus, he told me he’d like a few nights a week to himself, to “just focus inward.” Rather than embrace the solo time, I would sit in my own bedroom, filled with desperate, sickened longing. One night I so convinced myself of the wrongness of our separation that I biked as fast as I could (please picture Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz, pedaling aggressively to avoid the coming tornado) and landed on his doorstep weeping. He offered me tea and counsel, then sent me home—admirable boundaries—but having had a taste of domesticity, I was almost chemically changed, rewired. The independence I had so prized was replaced with a mourning that could be sated only by consistent male company, even if (as it would happen later on with other boys) that company was rude in bars, talked loudly through art-house movies, and made sure to point out my less than ideal breast-to-butt ratio. Anything would do.
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Even if some people like to be alone, nobody likes to be lonely. It’s been the subject of more art than can be consumed in a lifetime, the human aversion to loneliness and also the way we attune ourselves to it, become entrenched in a routine that isolates us. Too much has been said about the way technology allows us to experience the illusion of connection and retreat further into hermetic patterns, but it bears repeating that texts, emails, Facebook pokes, and Twitter faves do not a social life make. People are, it would seem, lonelier than ever and also less used to being alone.
I recently spent the day with a girlfriend who was ruminating, almost obsessively, on what she would do for dinner that night. “I’m considering going out to eat alone,” she said, as if she were confessing to the murder of an innocent family of farmers. I’m not exaggerating when I say that she spent hours upon hours weighing the pros (“I really love the hamburgers at this place”) and cons (“But won’t it look weird? Maybe not if I sit at the bar”).
“You’re insane,” I said. “I love to eat alone. I live for it. What’s more luxurious than enjoying your food without someone talking your freaking ear off?”
But I looked into my recent past and tried to remember such a time—sitting alone in an Indian restaurant spooning paneer onto my plate unmolested, or wearing my summer dress outside a café as I pored over the paper—and I was completely unable to locate an image of it. It was that pesky six-year relationship and the habits of someone unused to venturing out without a companion’s prodding. For an exquisite moment, rather than mourn the loss of my partner, I mourned the loss of my bravery. I used to have no problem staring into the face of the hostess when I said, “Just one for dinner, thank you.”
As my relationship had unbraided itself, I would often fantasize about my own space, the mythical room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf once told every woman writer to demand, and I’d go so far as to conjure a floor plan, place the furnishings down, stack my books. But that was easy to imagine with a living, breathing body beside me, the constant option to call someone and complain about the chaos of my day or the stain on my skirt or the irritatingly apologetic way in which the woman at the pharmacy had asked for two forms of I.D. Now, security blanket removed, folded and shipped to some distant warehouse, I moved in with my parents and lay across their spare bed texting everyone I knew, “sup?”
So how do you get back your taste for solo life, overcome the fear of your own thoughts? Even when my partner was away for work, the house had always been full with his presence—a wayward red sock, a pile of used earplugs. A Batman watch bought on eBay but never worn.
I started slowly, with a bath, the kind that lasts so long you resemble a Shar-Pei, the kind where the water goes from scalding to fairly drinkable, the kind you let drain around your shivering body as you remember moles you’d forgotten dotted your abdomen. I found that the bath was a good starting place because bathing alone is natural, something you might even do with someone in the other room Skyping their cousin or playing video games.
I read a poetry book cover to cover sitting at the kitchen counter while my parents were out for the night enjoying a more active social life than I do, double-fisting leftover Danish.
Then I stepped into a restaurant not far from the house and asked for the table by the window, where I ordered only tea and a bread basket but considered it a start.
Finally, four months after the end, I found myself spending a weekend in the country, and I stepped outside and away from my companions, onto a gravel path, and in the dimming pink of the sunset I began along my way. It was simple—one foot in front of the other, hands swinging at my sides—but I thought, rather dramatically, I will remember this moment all my life. I had not, for once, succumbed to the numbing effect that sleep can have on the grieving. I had not demanded that my entire family join me in the TV room to rewatch a sitcom. I had made the choice to face the world—trees, sky, even a rude, shoe-thieving neighborhood dog named Rico—on my own, with the power and presence of someone who can tolerate herself.
I moved out of my parents’ place. The new apartment was temporary, clean and corporate, and soon the movers would stack nearly 70 small boxes, inefficiently but lovingly packed (a dish between two items of clothing, a trophy crushing a wide-brimmed hat) by the man with whom I once shared a humming home. I put my hands on my knees, winded from the sheer marathon of putting up with my own mind, and looked around. Outside boats moved along the East River like my pain meant nothing to them. Someone would be coming over soon, the electric current of new romance in the air, but I was still defining myself by what I had lost. And yet, standing alone in a temporary space, I could still feel the light in the nurse’s cabin bright on my face and the relief of the quiet, my quiet, to do with as I like, and the expanse of unused time stretching out before me.
If I were being didactic I would say that this, this pure and fiery solitude, is the time in which women form themselves—and that a patriarchal society has removed that privilege from us through the threat of eternal loneliness as a penance for the sin of loving yourself.
If I were being poetic I’d say that I felt like Peter Pan, having his shadow sewn back on by an obliging Wendy. I could see clearly just how much work I had to do to move forward, how it was almost like picking up a second job to make emotional ends meet. My new pastime was making the quiet all right for myself, defining my boundaries so that I had space to dream. I made a list, on actual paper, of things I like to do, activities that bring me joy, pursuits that nourish me (the ground rules: Do not mention work, work dinners, or masturbation. This is purely a list of useless but fulfilling stuff, like beading).
Friends called and I started to feel like I could pick up without worrying about the hitch in my chest the moment they asked, “How are you feeling about it all?” I had some answers now that they might actually buy, that sounded healthy and self-assured and like the woman of extreme independence I wanted to become again. “I’m good, just chugging along.” But if I were being honest I’d answer them by saying that my heart could still ache for one home as I returned to myself in another.
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