The Art of Living Alone

Written by Gisele Sanchez

For the past few weeks I have been living alone.

Well, not completely alone. I have a roommate, but a few weeks ago, she left for the weekend and I was left to fend for myself. It wasn’t until I was forced to face the silence that I realized how isolated the city made me feel. The kitchen, living room, bedroom, and all the little useless but generously sized spaces between the windows were mine alone. It was unsettling.

The second I stepped into my little hallway-shaped apartment for the first time—complete with a couch that errs more on the side of a bench and two beds that were so big I had to squeeze my monster-sized dresser into the closet just to keep it from suffocating the poor radiator—I finally understood loneliness. Something about being too free, having too much personal space, too much time, it all culminated into this nothingness that was both suffocating and full of hope. I cannot even imagine what a house would have done to me. It didn’t help that the walls were still pasty and lacking in any kind of personality. I regretted not bringing the old magazine pages I have on my walls back home in Texas back with me (somehow the COVID-era scotch tape I used is still managing itself quite well there). Roomie’s side had a pulse at the very least, but the Target lamp she put together still didn’t have a lightbulb.

I had the terrible need to assess my current situation and make some sense out of it. When I was a teenager, living alone was a domestic dream I couldn’t wait to see come true—I fantasized about it. And no, I wasn’t fun at parties, the only parties I was going to were held in someone’s backyard and typically included an ice chest full of booze (the sodas were at the bottom) and a piñata. I had the urge to blame the poor apartment, even though I fully consented to being stuffed in it for the year. Despite Roomie and I having our sights set on another apartment, we got a housing number that practically told us to consider living in a public park, so a little place on the second floor of a “southie” facing the commuter rail didn’t seem so bad. And we were right, hell, we didn’t even realize that Domino’s was right down the street. And still, I had the nerve to feel unsatisfied.

While I didn’t fully understand the source of my loneliness, I had a feeling it might have something to do with the fact that I am a senior. My poor apartment felt like a patient goodbye before it ever felt like a home. Even as I pushed my boxes up the creaky, carpeted stairs my mind was already thinking about how it will be even harder to drag them back down in the spring without knocking myself out like a fleshy bowling pin. I’ve tried to remedy myself in several ways, but I suppose all that is left is time.

Existing somehow felt heavy, and I woke up every day feeling like I was in someone else’s space. I resented it. And, I couldn’t explain why. If I could have, I suppose I wouldn’t be wasting my time with college and instead write some kind of self-help book with my face on the back of it and a title as obnoxious as the collar peeking out of my fancy psychologist-writer vest.

Maybe something like, The Art of Living Alone.

In a more intentional attempt to fix what was wrong with me, I finally left the place to “explore the neighborhood.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was only a short walk away from the St. Mary’s T-stop, and managed to climb on without even thinking about paying. Living in proximity to Brookline is convenient, but not for the weak of heart—or wallet for that matter.

If you’ve never heard of Brookline, or have but (much like myself before this fall) haven’t spent much time there, all you have to know is that it is something like a moral purgatory for the wealthy and ultra-educated: expensive enough to be financially exclusive, but embellished with just enough pride-meets-BLM flags to be considered diverse. On the intersection of Beacon Street and Harvard Street is the—in terms of geography alone—quaint neighborhood of Coolidge Corner. Aside from overpriced specialty shops, like the one selling notebooks filled with handmade paper, there are “normal” stores like GameStop and Trader Joe’s; although, any grocery store with that extensive a selection of fall-related produce and snack hardly qualifies to be in the same category as Walmart.

Even though I write all of this with an undeniable undertow of bitterness (and to a certain extent jealousy), it is one of the only places near campus where I can find a cafe that won’t leave the smell of burnt bagels on my clothing for the rest of the day.

There weren’t any tables at the cafe I’d remembered from the previous finals period, but I was convinced that if I bought a drink one would open up so fast that I would spot it before I even finished wondering if I was a bad person for only tipping a dollar. I was wrong. I decided to sit outside, but seeing as the only table available had a sign on it that meant it was for people using wheelchairs, I hesitated. Eventually, I sat down with the intention of getting up if anyone needed the seat. A few minutes went by, and sure enough, when I looked up from my notebook there was a woman in a wheelchair looking for a table, a small coffee sat perched between her knees.

I immediately regretted my decision and stood to offer the table to her.

“No, no, you stay,” she said waving me down, “I don’t mind sharing if you don’t.”

Gray hair swept over her eyes in the exact way I had been trying to achieve for months, and I was immediately intrigued by the way her crooked smile reminded me of Molly Ringwald.

“No, of course not,” I said quickly, moving my things away from the far end of the table.

She pushed herself closer to the curb where the table was, lifted her black acetate round sunglasses up from her eyes and into her perfect hair, and took the first sip of her coffee. I couldn’t help but notice the differences between us.

“These days are limited.”

It took a moment before I realized she wasn’t talking about death.

“Oh, I know right. Yeah. The weather, ha.”

Despite my terrible eye contact and awkward laughing, I was trying. My inability to respond with confidence caused me to lose even more confidence, and over and over again I kept slipping into my own head. Her clear voice would have to drag me back out onto the sidewalk again.

“So what are you studying?”

“Oh, I’m a literature major. Comparative literature, it’s just like English but basically like global instead of just English,” slip, slip, slip, “but you generally, like, pick a focus. I picked Korean,” I finally finished and glanced at the book by my side.

Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982. I thought of my mother suddenly.

“That’s nice,” she nodded and proceeded to ask me about the languages I speak and what kinds of things I wanted to do after college, the kinds of questions I wished I had a more solid answer to myself.

The exchange went on for so long afterward that at some point I couldn’t feel the sun on my back anymore. She’d waved to a few passersby as they came and went: people she used to live in the same apartment building with, people she’d seen at the cafe before, people that just happened to smile at her. I maintained the same hunched position throughout the entire conversation and realized that my body might have internalized the whole “stranger danger” thing to a point of corporeal reclusion.

“Living in the city is really great. You know, I think there’s more community in the city than in the suburbs. I once had two construction workers carry me over a blocked crosswalk in New York. They were in the middle of working on it, and then they just stopped drilling and came to help me.”

Having spent the last few days without saying a word to a single person, I couldn’t quite find the enthusiasm I thought was both necessary and genuine enough to respond appropriately.

“Wow, that’s really great. Were you surprised they did that?”

“Yeah, I was.” She could see right through me, all the way down to the follow-up question. “You don’t think so?” Her head tilted to the side as she tried to find my averted eyes.

“I don’t think what?”

“That the city is a community.”

“Oh, no it’s not that. I just, I can’t say I am very involved,” I admitted, hoping she would understand what I meant even though I didn’t quite understand what I meant either. She paused, and her smirk suggested she knew about it all, from the closet-dresser to the pathetic self-induced loneliness.

“I live in an apartment building where on the first floor there is a memorial picture frame for the people in the building who have died. Some weeks the building administrator can’t go a day without switching out the picture,” she squinted against the sinking sun, “other times, I’ll see the same face everyday for a few months.”

I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say, but I felt like I was already in the wrong.

“My two neighbors, Eileen and Charlotte, are the smartest people in that building. I can hear Eileen listening to podcasts about different things, plants and such, all the time. And Charlotte, she’s always asking me about the New York Times puzzles—you know I started doing those regularly, they’re really good for your brain’s cognitive ability. Anyway, she’s always asking so I do the puzzles so I can have an answer for her. I’ve lived between these women for years, and I’ve watched them deteriorate every day. Both of them have dementia. And it wasn’t until a few weeks ago, after Eileen came to my door in tears because her phone wasn’t working and she couldn’t call her daughter that I realized how important I am to them. I’m a stranger and I’m all they have.”

I stayed silent, suddenly embarrassed about all the moping I’d done that weekend.

“What’s worse is that I think they know what is happening to them. They’re mentally deteriorating yet somehow the brain is still capable of making sure they know it. It’s cruel, really. But out here, in the city, by a cafe, at a street-side table, you can just sit.”

I took it all in like a dart to the forehead. I didn’t know Eileen or Charlotte, and I probably never would, but our worlds were the same, and I lived only a train ride away from them. The three of us were living out the days of now between four walls in the middle of Boston, and somehow I got the impression that only I didn’t know how fortunate I was. I didn’t set out with the intention of finding the cure to my restlessness, and I don’t know if what the woman said to me was a real solution to anything, but something shifted.

“You know what,” another voice, a woman, spoke out from the table beside us. She wasn’t the same college girl with a little pomeranian that had been there when I first sat down, which made me realize the tables inside and outside of the cafe had been empty for some time now. “There’s a lot going on in my world too, but right now I am just gonna be still.”

“Yup,” the woman across from me replied, “just be here now.”