Every friend starts out as a stranger, and every home starts out as raw materials - steel, concrete, plaster, and wood you have nothing to do with. By the time you’ve moved your furniture from one backdrop to another, it’s likely you’ll still stumble as you recite the address to a deliveryman or a cabdriver. You won’t know a face on the sidewalk - never mind the names, for you almost never know the names - but you won’t know if the guy on the stoop lives there or not or if the weeping woman at the curb is something out of the ordinary.
By some fluke, I forgot to record my move to the new apartment on my calendar. I could figure it out with a little work, but I already know I will find out that I’ve lived here too long to still feel this foreign. I suppose I don’t need dates for that sort of revelation, because I feel it enough when I tiptoe into the kitchen at night alone. Or I close the bedroom door tight behind me, sealing myself into the air-conditioned shell, and I think of all the space beyond it - the neighboring bathroom next to a deep closet, the long hallway shiny with varnish, the peekaboo pocket of kitchen, and echoing box of living room.
I’ve never had so much space to myself anywhere I’ve lived. The girl next door recently introduced herself and complained about the noise I’ve made since moving in rather in what I thought was a pretty reasonable way. “My boyfriend and I thought it was coming from upstairs, but then we realized it was you,” she said in a grim smile. I was wondering if she stomped on my doormat when I wasn’t home. Then I wondered if she thought it was strange that I lived alone in the same space she shares. “Just you,” she could have been thinking. It was a weird encounter. Neighbor was in a bathrobe at 9 pm, and she’s under the age of 70.
Everyone in this building, really in this area, is either an older black person who’s been here since the neighborhood was dangerous and cheap or a working professional comfortable with being a kind of colonist. I think most people live with someone else. I’m by no means alone as a single white woman on this side of Central Park, but I’m one of the youngest. I work late almost every weekday, save for tutoring cancellations and illness, so I’ve seen the living room bathed in sunlight only a handful of times and exchange pleasantries with passing neighbors maybe twice a week. We’re on different schedules and in different places. A cab driver dropped me off once, and asked how I found anything to eat in my mostly residential area. I told him I never needed to. “I work late, so I pick up something on the way, or I eat fruit or cereal at home,” I said. Popcorn, which I ate so much at one point that I’m now impervious to the smell, wasn’t mentioned.
I’m living a very stereotypical “Jack’s wasted life” kind of existence. I love the space, but can’t seem to fill it with enough time and energy to make it feel like mine. Materialism can’t be the answer. I don’t want more stuff. Same with a roommate or a cat. What I need is time, and that doesn’t come easily. Maybe when the seasons change, maybe when something more is figured out, maybe when I finally buy a couch these walls - as in “If these walls..” - will talk. I’d like them to say, “Oh, hey. You’re back. We missed you.”
I’m moving to a new apartment in December and will be living, for the first time, with no roommate. Very much looking forward to it(minus the rent increase) but hope I,too, can make my little space in this world feel like home.
Kristy
That loyal reader in SC
Living alone is the best, and amazingly, the place is feeling more comforting. I still need a couch, so my living room doesn’t echo.
I’m so ready to live alone. This fact amazes me as I am such a social person I always thought it would be a solitary existence but the older I get the more I long for it.