Woolfian Musings

Received an e-mail tonight from someone I care deeply about who is suddenly, and not by choice, living alone. This person remarked that in spite of the unhappy circumstances, living alone had its merits, and I was suddenly someplace else altogether: no longer at my desk, in the dining room, ten feet away from my sleeping baby, dogs on either side of chair, husband and four-year-old just on the other side of two walls. This comment struck a nerve with me, for I am now so seldom alone, and I crave it--solitude--so desperately sometimes. But I was going to say how I had been transported, whisked away to an apartment that was little more than one large room with a wall put up in the middle, dividing it: living space and sleeping space, each space preciously, wholly my own.

It was the year after graduate school; I must have been 25. 26? Not important. I too had found myself unexpectedly alone, and circumstances had conspired to bring me this apartment: a so-called one bedroom apartment on 70th Street, on the West Side, in a brownstone on a pretty little street with trees and a French bakery and sunlight streaming in the tall windows on the painted green floors. I loved the floors, especially, and my aunt--also suddenly alone and without the space for them--lent me two enormous soft chairs with ottomans that were covered in green-patterned linen, which looked as though they had been chosen especially to go with the floors. And my bed, which I assembled myself--I will never forget the sense of accomplishment when I finished, in the middle of the night, dripping with sweat--was also green. I had bought it in Cambridge, with money from my one of my first paychecks, and although I'd owned it at that point for a couple of years I had never put it together alone.

I loved this apartment, more than I realized at the time, I realize now, not because it was such a great place, although it was lovely, but because it was mine. I paid rent, of course, and it was quite reasonable. I worked freelance, in publishing, and I tutored, for cash, which I kept in a little antique wooden dresser that my mother had given me, and I always had plenty of money to do what I wanted to do, and I always did what I wanted to do, which mostly was stay home and read. That's not true--I probably went out more at night that year than any other of my life--out to dinner, out with friends, out to parties, just out (and I do remember the feeling of coming back at night, when I wanted to be alone, and sighing with gratitude at the luxury). But living alone affords one so much time alone that there is plenty to go around, so I went out, all the time, but I also stayed in all the time--on weekend days, which I have not had in the city forever now--and I sank into one of my aunt's green chairs, and I read.

Many things happened to me the year I lived alone in the apartment with green floors. One night two friends came over after work, and one of them brought a bottle of Tanqueray for a housewarming gift. I drank too much, with tonic, and got sick, and my friends were so kind to me--I remember I was wearing black pants that I'd bought in the largest size at a children's store, and I was drinking out of a big plastic cup. I hosted my graduate school friends for a little get-together and served frozen hors d'oeuvres I'd bought at Food Emporium, and they thought I was being ironic, but I actually love frozen hors d'oeuvres: tater tots, pigs in blankets, things like that, and we ate them off the cookies sheets set on the ottoman. My cat, Rory, who is still my cat, lived with me: she slept with me in the bed, and I wonder, now that she has been banned permanently from all bedrooms due to allergies, if she too remembers--in some non-verbal cat fashion--this apartment with the green floors, in which she was allowed--no, encouraged--to sleep in the bed. If you have a pet, you are never alone, and if you live alone, with a pet, you are truly fortunate, as is your pet: there are no other humans around to muck up the relationship.

Sigh. I feel old now, writing this. But it has made me happy to remember, and perhaps--if I am stalled one day--I will write some more about it, this apartment, living alone--because I have so much more to say that I am making myself stop, plugging the dam, as it were. But I do want to say that if you ever find yourself living alone, by choice or by circumstance, there may be hidden goodness in the experience. In some ways--although even earlier tonight I put my baby down for sleep and stroked her head with the back of my hand, thinking, "I have everything," and felt lucky to be in a home with a family--there is also something blessed in being, truly, by oneself.