I loved living alone. I’d moved here a couple months ago and I still didn’t have any friends, nor did I want any. I embraced the quiet hours at night, sitting outside most days, smoking and drinking wine and letting the mosquitoes devour me. I hadn’t heard from my father in a while, I felt like he’d gotten used to my absence quickly and that, too, I embraced. The distance felt good — needed.
Life here was beautiful; I loved the sea, the salt in the food, the sweetness of the plums I plucked from the trees outside my house. I didn’t have a proper garden yet, I hadn’t yet figured out how to grow vegetables and the grass was dry and hurt beneath my bare feet, but I loved it nonetheless.
Wednesdays, I went to the market to buy fresh meats and fish. I didn’t know the language but that didn’t scare me. People were nice here, welcoming. The warmness had startled me at first, as I wasn’t used to it from home. I felt comforted by the gentle smiles of old women, their wrinkly hands handing me paper bags of raisins and dried mango. They complimented me, told me that I was as beautiful as a butterfly, that my body was a dream, that I was lucky. At home, I never felt comfortable being observed in such a way, but here I didn’t mind. I appreciated the earnesty with which they told me any man would be happy to have me, though I did not tell them I did not want any man. And yet, I felt reassured in my desirability, despite myself.
I worked from home, the only tie to my past I could not let go of. I was an online counsellor for nearly everything, helping people look for jobs or flats or therapy or sometimes just to talk. I could not bring myself to abandon my clients — I had three big ones, the others I could refer to another counsellor. The first client I had was an older man named Brett, he was forgetful and startled easily. I let him tell me about his day, which was always the same: He got up, brushed his teeth before breakfast, had a coffee and bread with schmear, showered and sat in the big chair in the living room. He didn’t like to read, something I had tried to get him into a couple times already. He didn’t like watching TV either, nor did he care for music.
“Brett,” I sometimes said, attempting to hide my pity behind a playful smile, “you’re still fit! Get out there, let the sun warm you up!” He would blush and shake his big, balding head. I truly did pity him. I imagined inviting him here, into my new home. I could make him a nice breakfast, with good, fresh bread and the best meats he could ever imagine. The sausages from the market were exquisite — he would startle at their delicious saltiness, at the richness in flavor. He would never again want to eat bread with schmear.
Sometimes, he asked me to tell him about my new home, though I already had time and time again. He liked when I walked him around the house with my laptop, pretending he was there with me. I only did this for him, none of my other clients ever had gotten a house tour, let alone multiple. Brett was old enough I tended to forget he used to be a real person. Was a real person. Old people reminded me of children, they possessed the same honesty, one due to their inexperience with humanity and the other due to their excessive confrontation with it.
My second client was named Sandra but wanted to be called Sam. She said she felt neither like a boy or a girl and most of our conversations were practically therapy sessions, which wasn’t my field of expertise, but I found that talking to a teenage girl experiencing an identity crisis was pretty easy to handle. I called her Sam and nodded along with a concerned frown, as she spoke through a snot-filled nose, crying about her mother not respecting her dimwitted plea for attention. I did not tell her that I didn’t understand the gender thing either, as I deemed it not of importance. Maybe it was good, even, my detachedness to Sandra’s made-up pain. I was a teenager once — I knew how helplessness made you act out, so in a way I could relate to her generation and their collective feeble sense of self that came with being born after 9/11, even if their issues seemed ridiculous and volatile to me.
Sandra used me as a weekly diary and I let her, though our sessions always drained me of all my energy — I had rarely spoken to anyone more whiney, but I still felt I could not leave her alone. I knew the most important thing she needed was accountability, so I offered her exactly that, ignoring the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach whenever my appointments with her rolled around.
Pauline, my third client, was my favorite. She needed actual help, which, in turn, made me feel needed. She was in her early fifties and couldn’t keep a job — why she wouldn’t say, but I didn’t care. I imagined her sleeping around at work or stealing or having a BO so vile they could never keep her around for long, all musings that entertained me more than anything. What mattered to me was that I could help her; I would sigh when she called in and asked for help, would ask her with a heavy tone what she wanted to try out next, would say “I’ll look into it” and pick out phone number for her to call, or call numbers for her whenever she felt too shy. I was good at that sort of thing, which is the other reason I didn’t quit — I wasn’t old and I was smart, so finding another profession wouldn’t be too difficult, but I didn’t enjoy learning something, I wanted to be able to do it and be good at it. I was perfect at my job. I cared both very much and very little. I was in it with my brain, not with my heart, though I did feel attached to my clients, in my own way.
I wasn’t a big swimmer, but I liked going to the beach to walk on the wet part of the sand. I liked collecting shells and poking dead jellyfish with my toes. The beach was nicest at dawn, which is when I took out my bike and drove so fast my skirt rode almost all the way up. I loved feeling the wind in my hair, drying the sweat building up at the base of my neck and above my top lip. I felt like a fisherman on a boat, blinking into the blood-stained horizon.
At the beach, I let my bike fall into the sand and kicked off my sandals. I thought of my day — I had spoken to Brett today and he’d told me about his bread and schmear, then asked me to speak to him about what I had planned for the day, so I had showed him my grocery list. Part of me wished I could take him shopping, that he would hold my scribbled list in his wilted old-person hands and shake his head at me, tell me to read it myself, that his eyes were too old to identify that chicken scratch of mine.
I’d bought everything I needed for a tasty shrimp pasta — I loved seafood, though it gave me a terrible stomachache. I was never one to let a harmless indigestibility get in the way of my enjoyment. My relationship with food was intimate, in a way; my mother was a calorie counter and my dad always scarfed down his food as quickly as he could manage, in order to leave the dinner table and thus my mother, and her judmental eyes scanning his body for pouches of fat.
The less my mother ate, the more I took to cooking for myself. The more I did it, the better I got, and I took pride in it. I chopped, I stirred and I sauteed, and I was good, I knew what I was doing, I had a feeling for it. My father liked my cooking, but he continued to voraciously ravage my pot roasts, my cannoli, my chicken soups. I cared for him and he repaid me by swallowing down my thoughtfulness whole, ungrateful and greedy.
So I stopped making food other people entirely. Maybe if I had siblings, they would have appreciated my cooking. Maybe we would have proper family dinners, laughing with full cheeks and greasy lips. We’d connect through food, like I had connected with myself through it — I knew myself, knew what I liked, what I could do without much practice, what I would have to develop a taste for, what I needed to work on. I mourned my non-existant siblings. I would let them stay with me and bake them the finest tarts, have them taste the most wonderful buttered crab legs and drink the purest of orange juices.
I looked up at the setting sun, watched it disappear behind the ocean like two lovers sharing a kiss after a long day apart. I walked along the beach and looked for shells and for dead jelly fish to poke with my toe. Thought about Brett, about Sandra and Pauline. About their problems and about mine. My father — wondered what he did now, all alone. My mother. Was she happy now? I pictured telling her about the old women at the market, about them holding my wrists, nodding approvingly, gifting me more kindness than I had ever known. I thought of my house, my new home.
I loved living alone. I still didn’t have any friends, nor did I want any. I embraced the quiet hours at night, sitting outside, smoking and drinking wine and letting the mosquitoes devour me. I rode home my bike.