Suddenly Single

The solitude settles around me as the light fades from the sky. I’m sitting with my legs down the couch, my back against the armrest, looking inward, into my newly rented 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

I moved in a few days ago and this is my first moment with nothing I have to do: no boxes to unpack, nothing to put away, nowhere I’m supposed to be, which is the exact moment I’d expect peace to show up, or relaxation, but instead loneliness sneaks up in this pause.

The last few weeks have been filled with doing — packing, apartment hunting, escrow closing, and finally moving. I couldn’t feel a thing in the midst of all the busy-ness of doing, but now it’s done and loneliness is left.

I could do something or go somewhere, but all the doing has caught up with me; blanketing me with fatigue. I’m too tired to do anything but sit and watch my thoughts pass, processing that my marriage is over. Done. Complete. Sure, there are papers to file, formalities, but the dividing of things, selling the house; the seemingly hard parts are all done. It’s just me living here.

After all the months when I waited for the sound of the front door opening, waiting late into the night for my husband to come home, having no idea where he was, and gradually fading into apathy, there’s a parcel of consolation knowing I’m not waiting anymore. I won’t have to wait for the sound of the key in the lock, handle turning quietly, footsteps avoiding the creaking floorboards as he slips into his office to sleep on the futon. Again.

Now I’m the only one that will be coming through my front door. But consolation is marbled with grief, because although nobody will come in late, nobody else will come home at all.

Loneliness is a familiar visitor, one I thought I could manage after being alone for so much of our two year marriage. I was alone when I came home from work, alone when I got up in the morning. We gradually slipped into separate lives.

I filled the emptiness with work, with food, even with hope that something could change. These artificial fillers had bittersweet aftertastes. Hope I held onto the longest, hope that he would say something, anything, to end the divorce machine.

But after we signed all the papers, selling our house to a couple from Massachusetts and I walked away with a check for my profit from the sale, hope slipped from my hands.

Now, there’s no hope of reconciliation. There’s nothing more to do except greet loneliness on the other side of the couch as it stares me down.

Maybe I should put the kettle on, in case loneliness wants a cup of tea.