As a child he developed a strange obsession with submarines,
and he’d spend hours in the bathtub submerging the tiny red plastic toys that
is mother purchased from the 99 cent store. The problem with the submarines was
that they had a tendency to float. Of course, if they’d just sunk perhaps it
wouldn’t have been a good kid’s toy either. It was only possible to submerge
the submarine by holding it tightly in the fist of his right hand.
She was lonely on Tuesdays. To be fair, she was lonely on
pretty much all of the week days. It had seemed like a grand adventure, living
alone after being in the company of her family for eighteen years, her college
roommates for four, and then her post-collegiate girls for four years. She had
decided that hit was time to live alone. She was twenty five years old. She
came home from work in the early evening, kicked off her shoes and ate ice
cream on the couch while watching a sitcom that rarely if ever made her laugh.
The primary thing about living alone was the profound
silence that reigned throughout the house. It had an unearthly quality, to her
mind. She had been the middle child of three rambunctious girls and had never
really known or lived in a house that was silent for more than an hour or two.
In college someone would always appear to have a conversation with or study. It
was strange how quiet a house was when no one lived in it. The floor, some old
hardwood, covered by a bevy of rugs would sometimes creak without notice,
causing her to suspect that someone was breaking into her house to steal her
money and probably murder her as well, or worse. And even though she knew that
the floor creaked, every time the floor creaked she had it in her mind that
someone had arrived and intended her harm, and she wouldn’t be quit of the idea
until she’d walked the small perimeter of the apartment, making sure that
nothing was amiss. Sub-consciosuly she must have known that no one was in the
house or else why would she walk the perimeter looking for them? Perhaps she
should always jump out the window and on to the fire escape when the floor
creaked.
When she’d been young her mother, a single parent, had
allowed her to walk home from school starting in the fourth grade. Her younger
sister had to stay at after care, and her older sister was busy with
gymnastics, and so she was allowed to trudge the six blocks home, on white
washed sidewalks, and quiet shady streets. And she’d arrive home, she now
remembered, to the same silence that greeted her now. Her sister or mother
always came home within an hour, but she would always wait for them, tensely,
hearing in the slightest change in the wind that same person come to bring her
harm. And so, through some fault in childish logic, she’d sit in a large leather
chair in the living room watching cartoons with a bat cradled between her knees
and the front door wide open in case she needed to run from an intruder. What
had she been thinking? She couldn’t even really swing the bat properly, and
keeping the door open would have served as an inducement to anyone passing by
to enter the home, rather than pass it by.
Something had been fundamentally
wrong with her, even then. She just wasn’t cut out for living alone. Her mind
did not operate rationally. She would spend hours thinking about old loves,
considering her failures, their mistakes, turning them over in her mind as if
it would change anything, as if she even cared. The only respite she found from
herself was mindless television, a nightly inoculation from the day’s woes.
She’d go online some nights and do light facebook stalking of old college friends,
scroll through a month’s worth of baby pictures, or honeymoon pictures in Rome.
She’d see all of their smiling faces, looking back at her, and rather than
remember the good times they’d had, she’d think of how far apart they were now,
how distant. How little the person having a pizza with some man named Steve on
the banks of the river was from the girl who’d always asked to borrow her
curling iron. In short, she found that by scanning the lives of other people
that she did not feel a more intrinsic kinship to them, a united sort of front.
Rather, she felt the distant instead.
She found that seeing them happy actually made her unhappy because it
disproved one of the great functional fallacies of the natural mind, that we
are the most important person in the world. And to see all these people, all
the people she’d once known, who’s hair she’d held as they vomited, who’s tears
she’d watched shed over old boyfriends, didn’t, probably hadn’t ever needed her
to be happy. She’d just been a convenience, a vector, a sign without a
signified. It was deeply depressing, so she tried to limit herself to a couple
of hours only three nights a week. Those nights she’d usually drink wine, and
eventually wind up scanning through pictures of old boyfriends, comparing herself
to their new loves, alternatively giddy and disgusted with herself for being so
excited when she still looked better than the new girl. Had she always been so
shallow? It was important not to think so.
it would undoubtedly be a suitable policy to follow in dealing with friends made on the score of their usefulness to us, for repaying the services of a large number of people is a full time job, for which life is too short.
ReplyDeletenor do we need more than a handful of friends of the amusing sort.
should we only have "good" friends??