Home Alone

This week my house became my home. I started (hand)washing my dishes at 10:30 the other night, with good music playing softly and all the windows open to catch and capture cool air before the dawn of another scorcher. I was home.

Right now, I find myself in a similar mood. Again, the good music, the beginning of the silent hours. I love the late night hours. Beyond the crickets and the occasional passing car, the world is mute.

Three years ago I sat on a train, studying my reflection in the glass. The angle was such that I could study my own profile. My arm laid inert across the seat beside me. Cool Spring sunlight coerced its way through the car. Shoulders relaxed, I studied the European suburbia whirling by. Living abroad for the second time, the great oddities of foreign life seemed--not blase--but certainly not exciting. Normal.

In that moment, I realized that I was an adult. No longer striving to define, or discover, or create myself, I knew who I was. A 28-year-old woman, in a tailored jacket, loose slacks, and great heels riding a train through a non-descript French landscape, unhurried, unworried, completing the day's work without self-observation. Until, that is, I saw my reflection.

As I sit here, three years later, I again feel adult, and for so many more reasons. Now I own a home, and it is full of furniture and momentos from a dozen years of international travel and a half-dozen jobs. I cooked dinner for some former students tonight. We ate homemade food from my kitchen, talked about art, listened to good music.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am where I am supposed to be. I'm living into my calling--whatever that means.

When I sat down at my desk, I meant to write poetry. I meant to write a poem about cool air after a hot day, about gentle lyrics in a tired night, about youthful passion--my students', which is burgeoning, and mine, which is strong, but fading. And yet I couldn't write a poem, and instead turned to my blog, because I can't figure out who I am writing to when I write poetry. When I write on my blog I know Amy, Dawn and a few others will read it. When I write poetry, it always seems to be directed toward this nameless other--sometimes God, usually the "him" who is consistently out of view.

Twice I have thought I had met the man I was going to marry. As both of those men are now married to others, I was clearly wrong. No longer do I mourn either of them, and at moments like this I don't even mourn the idea of them. I am content and happy as this evening darkens to night. Tonight I don't ache for a husband. I don't expect one.

At my brother's wedding last month, the relatives didn't hassle me about a boyfriend. I appreciated it, but was a little sad that they didn't even think it was worth asking. I have become the spinster of my generation. My mom says they were just too polite to ask. When did my relatives become socially sensitive? Polite? That couldn't be it.

I think I'm sad because I'm not sad. It seems that now that I'm content to be single, I'll stay this way forever. At the same time that I type these words of contentment, I feel that swelling in my throat, as if I've swallowed a helium-filled golf ball and it's trying to rise. That feeling that precedes vomit, or tears, or both.

I guess it's my sub-conscious' way of reminding me that I'm not as adult, as content, as fulfilled as I think. That I am lonely in the midst of the cricket serenade. I look around, and I see no romantic prospects on the horizon. I don't have the energy to bouy hope or faith that "he" will appear. But I have the strength to be content, to enjoy tonight. I wish I could vomit up that ball in my throat, spit it out and bury it, so that my contentment could be complete. How long before alone is OK?