#33 Alone in a new place

But not in a sad way

Day one

Being alone in a new city wearing these black knee high boots makes me feel alive in the world. I walk along a thickly peopled street and my heart feels like it’s blooming. The feeling: right before a tear falls. 

I pause in front of a restaurant window, I feign reading the menu, but really I’m looking inside where it’s warm and golden and expensive, at the people laughing over their oysters and wine. I had friends once, too. But now I’m here, alone, did I mention?
I sit in a bar reading a book, I worry that I look like I’m cosplaying aloneness, the words I read are Sanskrit, they mean nothing. I order a cocktail called Prayers of the Soulless. I am cosplaying aloneness.

Each day I am by myself in public and I have no purpose, no one is meeting me and no one within thousands of miles knows I am a person that exists. I could die and people might not know for days. And somehow this makes me feel alive in the world. Not lonely. Not alone. Just a small beating heart in a tight fist.

Day five  

Drinking alone, in public is strange. So far, I’ve had two dirty martinis in this little bar with quilted tablecloths. The first with gin, this second one with vodka. Both briny and Sicilian, very dirty! the bartender assures me. I also drink in the talking. The boy behind me, on a first date. He is so worldly. His date, polite and questioning, knows nothing. How could she? With the doe eyes and the bodice top. He knows almost everything about the world there is to know. The geographical comparative size of California to Wellington and what the soap store Lush was originally called, “my parents met making soap there, super romantic”. I don’t hear him ask her any questions. He continues to tell her things; about the cost of living crisis, about why red meat is important for your brain, about how he doesn’t one hundred percent like his job. No one does, he says, “not even you”. 

Hotel cleaners, are usually women, but at the hotel I’m staying at, many of them seem to be boys in their early 20’s. When I come back to my room at the end of each day, my bed is made all tight and crisp and creaseless. My dirty teacups have been replaced with clean ones. My towels are fresh and folded. My shampoo and cleanser and toothpaste, all in a neat line. Not how I left them. I think it’s just so novel, the kind of nurturing usually issued by women, now also from the hands of boys with a sebum problem.

Day seven

On Saturday night I go to a movie, Aftersun, drinking a small glass bottle of coke with my knees crossed the whole time. I cry at the end. And as the credits roll up, the dark room full of people is silent. Even after the lights wink on.
I wipe three tears off my cheek, slow rollers. No one else seems sad, but no one else seems to be alone. Soon, the silence thaws and people whisper to each other, Paul Mescal things, I guess.
Walking home I take a selfie in the pallid streetlight just to capture the moment. Wet eyed and white and really quite awful, at 10.45pm. 

Day ten

This coastal town is large and lonely feeling. I walk through it at 6pm on a Monday and it’s just splices of sunlight and angular Art Deco shapes and gulls screaming. The wind whips through the silent plaza, the houses on the hill above are gormless skulls on a mantle. I withdraw $20 from the ATM so I can wash my clothes at the laundromat. All the shops and bars and cafes are closed, but there is a warmly lit Buddhist centre with the door ajar and I smile into it as I walk by. The air in this town smells like bait and laundromat soap. I stand in the middle of an intersection, there are no cars and no people.

Day twelve

Making a new friend when you’re in a new place is nice, vital even. Last time I was alone in another part of the world, I was 23. I recall sobbing in my hostel bunk bed in Barcelona because I was alone in a sad way. It’s such a unique brand of sorrow to be by yourself in a buzzing hostel full of people who are cackling and not know how to cut into a crowd. One night I bought myself a wilted 2 euro salad and ate it tearfully in the hostel kitchen. By the third soggy slice of tomato I’d had enough, I stood up and moved across the room to a group of people who were talking quietly. My eyes were wet and hot and I asked, “can I sit with you?” They gave me a soft eyed smile, yes of course. I went with them everywhere after that.

The friend I’ve made on this trip takes me to her father’s farm. We ride pretty palominos up hills, her dad leading the way. With the low slung sun directly in our eyes and the horses lurching beneath us. Finally, we reach the top of a hill and it’s just green forever and ever. I haven’t ridden a horse in ten years, but it’s all come back, one-two-one-two (up and down) with the trotting, sit in it with the canter. Lean forward up hills, lean back down them. Hold the reigns between your pinkie and ring fingers, sit up straight. I think about how if I’d never ridden horses when I was a kid, I couldn’t possibly have done this now. I so often see myself as sportsless and weak, deeply uncoordinated. But this is something I know how to do.

Now I’m in bed, in the inky silence of this achingly beautiful farmhouse. And I’m thinking about how nice it is when people bring you into their lives when you don’t know them from a bar of soap.
I’m making a mental note to do that more.