Really Good, Actually(9)
I spent the evenings watching my murder shows (having plowed through England’s offerings, I was now exploring the sex-based killings of Scandinavia), and thinking about being alone, and sometimes just putting my feet on the floor and sighing. If I was feeling ambitious, I would brush my hair, open and close the windows, and fill online shopping carts with expensive outfits for invented functions. The group chat checked in regularly, but I never had any updates for them, and I knew they were busy enjoying their own lives—they didn’t need some loser divorcée dragging them down. I slept poorly but napped often. I’d eat lightly during the day, then start a bolognese or fajitas or some other ambitious dinner concept, and give up and eat cereal while watching someone called Anders or Lars skulk around Helsinki or Stockholm, furious at their ex-wives for having the audacity to be murdered. I found cooking for one exhausting and depressing.
I tried the mindfulness app but couldn’t make it stick. I did not want to be grounded in this moment. This moment was miserable! I tried to reminisce about past triumphs—graduating from university, say, or giving a blow job once in the South of France—but my entire life had been witnessed by Jon. I had to go back to high school to avoid him, and those memories were boring. Almost nothing had happened to me before we’d known each other. Meeting him had felt like the most significant event in my life, and until a few weeks ago, every year that passed had only reinforced that this was true. Now what? I thought. There are only so many times a person can read “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. It took three to four minutes, plus a few extra, for crying. I’d do that and be back, instantly, to now what? Now what, indeed.
Along with Janet, Jon had taken most of the better items in our bar cart (to say nothing of the bar cart itself), so I’d make cocktails from Cointreau and lemon juice and soda water, eventually using regular water, eventually drinking straight Cointreau. Once the Cointreau kicked in, I’d be ravenous for whatever dinner I’d abandoned, and took to ordering something I called “Night Burgers” from the only place that my delivery app offered at four a.m., a generic chain pub with a gigantic menu that included history’s most middling hamburger. A Night Burger was exactly this item, plain, with a pickle and french fries. It was bland and stodgy and always arrived cold, but I did not want the food to be an experience. I wanted it to look and taste how I felt, which was like nothing. I wanted a tepid meat puck, and I got one, often.
It was my first time, ever, living alone. Growing up with my parents, sister, two dogs, and a rotating series of doomed hamsters, our house was bustling. It was barely a transition to move to the din of university residence halls, where the boys wrenched the doors off stalls in the inexplicably co-ed bathrooms and rolled melted tubs of ice cream down the eleven-story back staircase, staining it pink and shutting down half the hallway for a week. As soon as we could, Amirah and Lauren and I moved in together, watching reality television and getting briefly into day-weed and never ever cleaning the bathroom.
After graduation we ventured farther into Toronto, and Emotional Lauren and I became the fifth and sixth residents of an enormous house in the west end, crammed with artists and baristas and grad students and—we found out after we moved in—one bat in the basement that someone’s boyfriend’s landlord had caught him keeping at his own place.
When Jon and I moved in together, it was the smallest number of people I’d ever lived with, and I loved it. I was twenty-three when we got our first apartment. Most of my peers were still in grubby shared houses (Emotional Lauren still had a bat in her basement). I felt impossibly adult. I liked coming home to one person—my person; liked making cupcakes at ten p.m.; liked putting on some weird album of Jon’s and vacuuming the rug so we could have sex on it. When I was in the house alone, if Jon was stuck at work or away with friends for the weekend, I savored it as a treat, knowing he’d be home soon to disrupt the quiet or drag me out of the bath. After we got married, I sometimes felt it was a shame that I’d never get to experience living alone but concluded I wouldn’t be very good at it. It seemed, so far, I had been right.
Still, there were a few benefits to my Personal Situation: I’d been given essentially unlimited bail privileges on account of it, and I exercised these with relish. I bailed on my own birthday, family events, coffee dates with colleagues and friends from high school I’d been meaning to catch up with for years. I attended only things I really wanted to, which meant I attended almost nothing, not even Lauren’s Jimmy Buffett Bang Bus Birthstravaganza. Lauren had been understanding. Emotional Lauren texted to say she’d added my name to the card: i copied your handwriting from that time we did MASH drunk . . . it says you’re going to have four husbands . . . tho apparently your future car is a toilet ? Part of me felt it was rude, avoidant maybe, to be ditching out on so much, but wasn’t this the kind of thing women were supposed to be doing, saying no?
The Old Me might have worried this would make people hate me. In the past I was worried about basically everything, basically all the time. Now my constant, low-level anxiety was replaced by a feeling of dull invincibility I referred to as “haha, so what.” Concerned you might be coming down with a cold? No illness could be worse than this new, gaping emptiness at the core of your very being, haha. Feel like you said the wrong thing at a party? The person who promised, in front of everyone you know, to love you for the rest of your life didn’t make it two years, so what! Missed a deadline for work? The thing is that life is actually a joke, and nothing is guaranteed to us, and anything you think is guaranteed will probably be taken from you unexpectedly, and also it seems like deep down you may be an unlovable shrew, which is probably a bigger problem than some late assignment—let’s give that a big haha, so what!