It was important not to think so

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.