Alone
Page 24
So usually I wait for The Man with the White Shirt to nod off. I know that by the third loud rumble he is surely asleep, and there I can safely say, “I love you I love you I love you.” I can just whisper it into his ear and not feel like a heartbreak soul singer from the sixties, lovin’ a man no matter that he can’t love her back the way she needs. But that’s who I am. I am a heartbreak soul singer from the sixties. I’ll take whatever he gives me, but sing sassily about it.
I lose my feminist card between the third and fourth snore.
I lose the game, my edge, I lose the future. I lose it all when I just lie there unlocking the contents of my heart as he so contentedly sleeps. And me, so content just to look at his face I may as well be fanning a palm frond over him, I am that clichéd a woman at this point but
this love,
it isn’t simple.
MAPS
There are so many things people don’t understand. “Why do you cry so much?” they ask. “Why are you still so sad about it two years later? Three years … four?” as though having a family one day and not having it the next, poof! in an instant, is a thing that one stops being sad about. That I once had a partner who loved me and supported me and wound his legs around mine each night. Someone to talk to in our own secret language. Someone to argue with. Someone to raise a child with. Someone to take out the garbage and fix the leaky faucet. Someone to make plans with. To unfold an old road map on the table with and say, “Where should we go?”
Why do I cry so much, yeesh. Now what I have is a faucet that’s been dripping for years. I fall asleep alone to the sound of water droplets gently click-click-clicking onto whatever plate I haven’t bothered to wash yet.
Why am I still so sad about it four years later, c’mon. For twelve years I was part of a beautiful, messy, important thing. I was in it. It was in me. Then, poof! I had to make my own thing, also beautiful, messy, and important. But different. Really fucking different. And it’s obscured by this new love, now old itself. A complicated and unnecessarily protracted love affair that only gives me occasional tastes of what I once had and what I want to have again —
legs touching mine in the night, and
secret languages and arguments and maps and
someone to fix the goddamn faucet already, or at least add a little gold to the cracks in my heart.
DATING
I still do date, sometimes. Because although The Man with the White Shirt is the one I love and want to be with, I also want a love that doesn’t need to wring its hands so much. A love that puts all its money down on one horse. I want monogamy. And commitment. The two things he can’t give me.
The only way for me to find it, then, is to meet other people. To go on dates with them. To have sex with them, in order to really know if they could be the one. Or at least the one for now. I’m not searching for “forever,” you know. I’m searching for right now. I mean, forever is great if it happens. But forever is the real problem, if you ask me. Forever is why people in monogamous relationships struggle. I should know, I was married once.
Forever is a scary thing to consider; it’s crazy that we vow to do it at all. We should vow to be kind to one another, to respect each other, to not forget desire and laughter when we’re on the hamster wheel. For as long as we’re together, let’s commit ourselves to these good, attainable things. Forever is a lifetime. Living up to it is the real wrench in relationships, not the need to fuck other people. Look, I get that polyamory works for a lot of people, but for me, it doesn’t. And yet, I have to do it anyway. As long as I’m dating, my love life is non-monogamous. I am non-monogamous, even though I don’t want to be. It’s that or celibacy. These are my choices.
Dating is hard. It can feel like an endless rejection loop. The ones you like don’t like you, the ones that like you, you don’t like. It’s like high school. All the fucking time. What’s so fun about that? Everyone is playing. Playing it cool or playing themselves up to be more than they are. Playing that they’re breezy when they aren’t, playing that they’re smarter than they are (or dumber, if you’re a woman, since we need to play down how smart we are a lot of the time). We all have to play the game of texting now, exhausting and confusing, especially when you’re juggling more than one person. There’s the juggling. Remembering who said what and which person you saw that movie with and which one is the one who … ugh.
It goes on and on. But I have to do it, if I want to find a committed relationship. So when I meet interesting people, I ask them out. I schedule them between single-parenting and loving The Man with the White Shirt. There have been a few times I dated guys that wanted to be in a relationship with me, and I wanted to give them a chance, even when I knew right away I wasn’t feeling it. I hoped I would feel it in time. I wanted to believe I could. But something was missing, even though I liked them so much. In those situations, I was the one who didn’t want monogamy. I wanted to keep seeing them and The Man with the White Shirt. And maybe even one other person. Who knows where I found the energy or time!
I don’t know why I didn’t feel passion and excitement for these guys. These wonderful, smart men that wanted to give me what I say I want. Is it that I’m most attracted to the ones that make me feel crazy with desire, the ones whose passion is at a ten? The ones who say they love me but can’t be in a relationship? Am I not able to feel love when it isn’t torture?
THE WELL
The Man with the White Shirt is fixing a window blind. The one in Birdie’s room that has fallen down three times now, the third time hitting me in the face, splitting my lip.
I can do so many things, you know? Why not this? I can carry my own mortgage and own a car. I can single-parent, book vacations, captain a soccer team, and have a successful career, but every single thing I hang, including this window blind, falls. Shelves, curtain rods, paintings, everything, they all fall. I mean, so what, but in the moment of the fallen blind and the split lip, I feel hopeless, helpless, so alone and exhausted. I text White Shirt.
He’s here now, gorgeous, my not-boyfriend of two and a half years, standing on Birdie’s bed, holding a power drill and fixing the blind while I sit beside his legs doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself. Sorry and sad that I once had a husband and now I don’t. That my husband would have hung the blind properly the first time and instead, waah waah me, I live alone and hang things badly. I imagine The Ex-husband somewhere at this moment having the best day ever in his best life ever now that I’m no longer in it.
“I feel like I’m falling down the well again,” I say in a small voice. Because I do feel like that lately, lost in that loop where I go back to the beginning of this chapter of my life, back to The Bomb, over and over again, replaying events of the past instead of living in the present. White Shirt stops what he’s doing and sits beside me. He takes my hand, firm, and looks right into my eyes.
“I will never let you fall down the well,” he says.
It has a startling effect on me. Like, not to be melodramatic, but it actually startles me. It’s as though he’s thrown a bucket of ice water on me to wake me from this self-pitying daze. I sob into his lap. I’m so grateful he’s here. That he’s my friend. That his is a wonderful, complicated kind of love.
It’s not the love I wanted from him, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted at all, but it did turn into this, this very real caring I’m receiving from this man. This man, with the white shirt, who’s always searching for himself and for another happiness, but will still come over in a flash to fix a broken blind or read comics with Birdie or stop me from falling down the well.
And then I cry more because after all these years I’m still crying, still feeling sorry for myself, forgetting how blessed I am to have a huge social support network. I’ve got my own self-support, too, if I would ever take two seconds to remember that. Yeah, me, I also will not let myself fall down the well. I have Birdie to think of, and a life to build. And I can do that on my own, even if I’m not so good with power tools.
And he does.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TRYING
TO THE SEA
Summer 2016. I’m off to Italy again. This time on my own, a totally different experience than last time, in The Year of The Bomb, when I went with Birdie and my niece. This time, it’s all about going out for expensive drinks and dinners, night after night, with my friend The Expat Journalist, who’s been living in Rome for the past few years. She’s Italian Canadian like me. Unlike me, she’s young and thin and living a happily single life in the country of our blood. Each day she rides off to work on her cute Italian bicycle, dressed stylishly and never seeming to sweat.
“Fuck you, you never sweat!” I shout at her.
“Fuck you, I do SO!” she shouts back.
“WHATEVER. Okay have a good day at work, see you at dinner, love youuuuu!”
“Love YOUUUUU!”
This is how we talk to each other. This is why I love her and have missed her back home where we used to work together and she was the only person that seemed normal. Normal because yelling. Because swearing. Because Italian.
Anyway, here we are in actual Italy and she goes to work each day and I am alone in the city, a city I love, a city I don’t mind being alone in at all. All I do is wander. I walk and walk for hours, watching people, talking to people, and getting lost. I get lost a lot, because I like to think I know where I’m going in Rome, and sometimes I do, but a lot of times I don’t. And I refuse to pull out my phone to look at a map. Or even to look at the paper map I have stuffed into my purse. I don’t want to look like a turista.
So I get lost. A lot. But it doesn’t matter because I have no plans, no one to worry about. I can do whatever I want at whatever speed. A thing you probably don’t know about me is that this is when I’m truly happiest alone — wandering city streets, soaking up the smells and sounds and colour all around me. I’m truly happiest alone when I’m getting lost.
It’s really fucking hot, though, right now, even for Italy in July. There’s some kind of record-breaking heat wave happening all across Europe, and it’s like fifty degrees with the humidex. I love the heat, but even for me it gets to be a bit much. My dress is soaked through, and I need to find a breeze. There are no breezes on the tiny, crowded streets of the centro storico. So I head to the river, stopping at a little stand to buy a rice ball that’s as big as a baseball and a peach that’s even bigger.
At the river, I climb halfway down a steep set of concrete steps, then sit on a flat section overlooking the water. There’s no one around, except for a man in a business suit at the bottom of the steps who’s picking up rocks and throwing them into the water. He’s not even trying to skip the rocks or anything. He just pitches them hard, one by one. It’s strangely cathartic and lulling to watch. I wonder if he’s okay, even though I feel sure he is. Sometimes you just need to hurl rocks into the Tiber. I’m sure he’s not the first. So I just eat my gigantic arancini and watch him.
Eventually, he stops. He wipes his hands on a handkerchief then stands perfectly still for a second, staring at a boat going by. When he comes up the steps I realize how handsome he is and how fancy his suit is. As he passes me, he tips his head and says, “Salve!” in greeting, as though I haven’t just watched him have a controlled midday meltdown.
“Fa caldo oggi!” he continues, fanning himself with his hand for extra emphasis.
“Si, si! Ma troppo!” I say, hoping I sound Italian enough.
“Yes, ah, eees verrry hot,” he answers in broken English. “Verrry hottt, ah?”
We laugh in transatlantic agreement and away he goes.
I continue to sit and look at the river. Yes, I’m on vacation in Rome and I could be looking at a Michelangelo or shopping at Fendi or whatever it is regular people do on vacation here, but I’m sitting cross-legged on a concrete slab feeling the breeze. For the first time in a long time, I feel content. Fortunate. Satisfied. I feel absolutely okay with not having someone to share this moment with.
I feel okay.
This is the very beginning of a very different me. A slow return to the me I used to be a long, long time ago. Back when I travelled on my own without any hesitation. Back when I used to be totally comfortable sitting in cafés alone for hours. Back when being alone wasn’t a big deal at all. For the past four years it’s been a huge deal, as you well know. The Lonely grabbed hold of me and held on. Tight. Only now, here, across the sea, do I start to wrestle free from its grip.
A month later, back across the sea, but on the Canadian side, Birdie and I are with my friend Solo Time in Nova Scotia. We stay at her parents’ cottage for a week, perched on a windy cliff overlooking a harbour where the tide comes in twice a day. It’s one of the most relaxing weeks of my life.
I lie on a lawn chair in the sun, playing guitar for hours while Birdie and Solo Time read. We nap each afternoon underneath billowing curtains. We search the shore for beach glass. We set the table for dinner and clean up afterward. We sit around bonfires and listen to tall tales. We fall asleep to the sound of waves crashing right outside our doorstep.
When the tide is out, the three of us walk out as far as we can along the muddy ocean floor. It’s amazing to think that we’re even doing this. Birdie is SO happy here and Solo Time, also an only child, is relaxed and content back home in Nova Scotia with her parents. I feel good to be a witness to other people’s happiness. To be part of that happiness. To be at peace with the present. To recognize it.
Don’t get me wrong. I think of The Man with the White Shirt every single day. I miss him and dream about him and have so many stories I want to tell him and there are so many gifts I want to buy for him. But, as in Italy, I’m okay being here in this beautiful place without him. I wish he was here, but I don’t long for it. His absence doesn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. Both sides of the Atlantic have mellowed me out this summer, and I feel good about how far I’ve come. I no longer have to fill the empty spaces inside me with empty experiences. I don’t need to numb myself with alcohol and one-night stands anymore. I don’t have to try so hard to make love happen so I can get over White Shirt. I don’t have to try so hard to control what I can’t control.
And most importantly, here in the summer of 2016, it finally doesn’t feel like something is missing when Birdie and I are together. It feels whole again. Nothing is missing. All we need is for me to be present and grateful and hopeful and alive to the now. The tide goes out, but it always comes back in. You can swim over top of the exact spot you walked on earlier that day. That’s just how it goes. In and out.
In.
Out.
It took me a while, but I get it now.
It’s Late on a Saturday Night
I text him,
I miss your smile, your smell, blah blah blah.
And even though it is some ungodly hour and he is who knows where, The Man with the White Shirt texts me back immediately,
I miss your blah blah blah.
IT EXISTS
Birdie is skipping ahead on the sidewalk in front of us. Okay, not skipping, but jumping along, full of cotton candy and the wild night air. We’re under the expressway, walking home from a night at the CNE, the giant fair that sets up for only two weeks of the year, signalling the end to another summer.
I love the CNE, especially at night. I take Birdie every year at least once, and always on a weeknight. We walk through the midway, thick with people and colourful lights, eating mini powdered doughnuts, going on rides, wasting all my money on Ring-toss and Skee-ball. And then, when most kids her age are home and asleep for hours, Birdie and I walk back home to our apartment.
The first few years after The Bomb, when she was still so young, I’d carry her the entire way home. Away from the lights and corn dogs and rowdy teenagers, and through the big archway they call the Princes’ Gates, gl
eaming white and ornate against the night sky. From there we’d walk along the south entrance of the army barracks, then under the expressway, Fort York to one side of us and a new fortress of condos to the other. When we reached the Bathurst Street bridge, we knew we were in the home stretch. That’s where I’d always point out that this was the only place where she could see both her homes at once — The Ex-husband’s building on the west side of the bridge and mine on the east. “Pretty cool, eh?” I’d say, and she’d say, “For sure, Mom.”
As she got older, we’d make a show of who was more tired on that long walk back, who could drag their feet more, or who could drive the other crazier with peppy positivity, who could run the fastest. We’d stop and watch the trains rumble under the bridge. We’d take blurry selfies with the city lights and the CN Tower behind us. The walk home almost as good as our night at the fair.
This year is a bit different. This year, The Man with the White Shirt came with us to the CNE. He’s walking beside me now as Birdie runs ahead of us.
He’s taking my hand in his.
He’s saying, “Happy Anniversary.”
Holy shit.
It’s August 22, 2016. Three years to the day that kaboom, kapow! we first saw each other across a crowded café-bar. I know this of course, because I know the dates of everything, but for White Shirt to know it and acknowledge it is big. Big big. I’m almost paralyzed by the bigness of it. Happy Anniversary. And we stop to kiss, but not for too long, because Birdie’s up ahead and it’s 11:00 p.m. and we’re under the roaring highway in our beautiful city on this perfect August night. We sprint to catch her and she laughs. And even though she’s almost as tall as me now, The Man with the White Shirt lifts her up onto one of his shoulders and carries her there, side-saddle. Looking at the two of them, I feel light.