My mate left me for Massachusetts. Seventeen days he is away.
I walk the dog. I unroll my yoga mat and stretch into Indian poses. I play guitar and pencil meaningless feelings into notebooks. I write lists to trick myself into feeling busy. I bake batches of rolls, cutting them open and patting their floury cotton insides with peanut butter and strawberries or butter cream and sliced tomatoes. I cycle the streets of the north side of the city, book shopping, grocery grazing, lake front exploring. I have this idea to bike to the ferris wheels downtown and ride it by myself, but when I get there the lines are long and there is a sign that says I can't complain if they sit me in a carriage with strangers. So I go home, wishing my people were here.
Mom arrives on a Sunday to stay with me. I had told her no thank you many times. "Please don't spend your money. I'm about to live near you again." I say.
I will spend my time writing. I have already decided. I won't be lonely; I have the internet. Such flagrant ignorance I am now embarrassed to say.
My sister asks me to invite Mom. She really wants to come visit, she tells me, which makes me realize how much I really want her to come visit.
I call her.
"Hi Rachel!"
"Hi Momma!"
"Are you sure you don't want me to come?" She asks.
"I do! Please come." I say, embraced suddenly by a sense of relief for the future structure in my summer.
"Oh good!" She says, thrusting the portable phone to Dad whom I speak with for approximately three minutes before we hear, "I got tickets! I had enough points so I don't even have to pay!"
Scott leaves with his sister in the wee hours of a Wednesday in July. When I wake up alone the next morning, my days stand on top of me, one foot is on my chest and the other is like lead on my soft belly, shouting for submission. The skin on my face expresses my inner turmoil with a spread of new pimples....because my introvert personality isn't enough to make my living alone more difficult...I need some ugly pink lumps on my cheeks to keep me honest and home alone as well.
One night, I drink two jam jars of red wine. I voluntarily watch a violent television show, my eyes on the windows much more than the screen. Later I dance around our small living space while Janis Joplin's rasping cries reverberate through my sad drunken soul. How strange it is to listen to strangers singing, to the recordings of the dead? A bad ballerina I sloppily spin, slamming my elbow into a kitchen cabinet. I don't mean to sound like a sorry mess. This is how I cope with lonesomeness. I thought I could be like an old poet with my quiet observations. But my sentences are starting to resemble the ramblings of an illusive hermit. I don't want to be a hermit. I don't think a long beard would suit me. I speak to the cashier, the barista and the other dog owners at the park. The telephone helps a little, but it feels more like a tease. And the internet, it seems, is a mirage and a magic trick, leaving me with feelings of complete isolation and sorrow.
After twelve days alone, I am so grateful for my mother's arrival. When I see her surrounded by airport architecture and unfamiliar travelers, my despair disappears. I make her salad for lunch and together we cook salmon and sauté zucchini for supper. We go to the movies and buy wine and watermelon at a grocery store. During our first two days together, I have so much to say it is like the spilling of my mobbed mind.
I am a social creature. I have not evolved away from this truth.
Three bottles of chardonnay, one chocolate bar, two salmon fillets, homemade bread, two small cups of gelato, 22 episodes of Frasier, a full French press of coarsely ground Mexican coffee beans every morning, her walking-loafers, the Art Institute of Chicago, fine Italian cuisine and a sweaty walk to share some sushi where I cannot stop cackling at her attempt to pinch seaweed salad with chopsticks.
I make most of our meals. To compliment and thank me, she tells me to open a Bed and Breakfast.
"I'm telling you, Rachey, bed and breakfast...Can Scotty clean? He can clean the rooms and you can bake."
"Maybe when we're old." I say as I sit beside her.
I am moving home to Massachusetts. She's glad and so am I. She can say it now that it's really happening. I lean on her while we sit on the couch. I put my arm around her while we mosey down sidewalks. We are both delighted that I am no longer vegan. I make little breakfast sandwiches with tomato, cheddar cheese, lettuce, free-range hen eggs, poached with runny yellow yolks on my homemade toast. Butter on bread, feta over salad greens, chicken sausage grilled and cut, it is more than the flavor of this nosh, more than the tradition of such nutriment, I am just so happy to share supper again...without the pressured smiles to please me when I would create elaborate vegan feasts to impress my meat-eating clan. I have abandoned the rhetoric of diet books and look now to eat as organic, as simply and with as little stress as possible. I want food of old generations. Vegetables. Fruit. Bread. Nuts. Meat. Milk. Eggs.
The third bottle of wine we share is impromptu. It is her last night with me and we shouldn't stay home, we decide.
"Let's go get a glass of wine." She suggests as the credits conclude another 23-minute sitcom episode. We put on shoes and adjust our hair. Earlier, I had been crying on account of an encroaching anxiety swirling in my belly like a flock of birds before a storm. After my shower, when I open my mouth to speak, I sob instead.
We walk to a nearby square and read menus from glass cases. "Look, they have a patio." I say pointing to a chalkboard.
Inside, we are greeted at a tall dark wooden bar. A man, the manager I presume, leads us to a hidden garden with a fig tree and red flowers. We sit at a turquoise table. A young man with black eyebrows carries us curvaceous glasses of water, cloth napkins swaddling silverware and two small porcelain plates.
"Wednesdays are half-priced bottle of wine night with the purchase of two entries." The blond waitress tells us. Also, their pasta and cheese are made in house. This settles our evening (as if sitting on my couch has any chance of winning our affections after this proposal.) It is early and we're the only patrons on the patio so we lean back talking and laughing at ourselves for sharing more chardonnay. When others arrive, I lean my collarbones against the table's metal edge and we sip, saying secrets and old stories. Slowly, we serve ourselves from our salad of heirloom tomatoes, soft mozzarella, olive oil and one sharp basil leaf. Next, the spinach ricotta tortelli arrives. I spoon the folded brown buttered dough onto our plates. I press the pasta to the roof of my mouth where it dissolves into the ingredients of Italy. The crispy cod is carried to us then, one fillet with capers and kale for her and one for me. Grilled bread with herb butter and marinated red pepper spread, cold white wine and something beautiful called Pistacchio Praline Semifreddo, which our young gentleman helper tops with one frothy shot of espresso. We are spoiled and stuffed and now sleepy and silly. All hail love! She is my Queen of Hearts.
I hold the brick walls of the buildings as we walk to the gate on the sidewalk. Our tipsy giggles cause us to meander all the way home. She could stay until Saturday, she reminds me, concerned for my likelihood of loneliness.
"No that's ok." I tell her. "I'll clean, shop and bake. I can do it. Scott will be here Saturday."
I awake at 2am and begin thinking horrible thoughts. I go to the kitchen and eat a little roll with peanut butter. I pee and drink water and return to bed. Then I lie awake while my imagination plays picture shows of the generic tragedies of travelers: hijacking terrorists, engine failures, leaking gas tanks. In the blue light of the night, I look over at my mother sleeping. I stare at her high cheekbones which wear her soft pale skin so well when suddenly she opens her eyes and looks at me.
"I'm having trouble falling back asleep." I tell her like a child.
"All that binge drinking." She says before closing her eyes and rolling over.
This gets me thinking about a whole new problem. Am I back-peddling? I know I left the fruit cult to rejoin my tribe, but have I gone from extreme to extreme? Oh relax and enjoy your life, I tell myself before sleeping until sunrise.
While she packs her pink bag, I tell her why I couldn't sleep.
"Oh no, did you plan my funeral? I always plan the funeral." She says.
"No, but I was thinking about how if you died, I would kill myself." Since she is visiting me, I explain. I don't know why I tell her this.
"Oh dear."
"So don't die. Please." I say.
We are nervous travelers, walking through the airport toward security and her terminal. Her bag is on my shoulder. She holds her boarding pass and driver's license. I don't cry when we hug goodbye, but I ask, "Can you let me know when you land?" She will. Usually we are the no news is good news type, however after last night's imaginative adventures, I would like to know that she's landed at Logan.
It feels like he abandoned me, but I see now that it was me. I abandoned my people. I fell for society's seductive appeal toward digital desolation. I can just go online. I told myself. I can temporarily replace real relationships with telephone wires, video meetings, posts of pictures and email messages. This, I know now, is a dreadful oversimplification of the complexity of love. Only temporarily can I distract myself with a digital version of life. Eventually, I only yearn for the skin of my kin and the sanctuary of familial noise and the smell of a crowded stovetop.
We say person, human or woman, but I am an animal. An intelligent animal, but one designed to work and to be with others. We once lived in packs, eventually villages, later houses with one telephone, one television and one kitchen. Nanas and Papas, Mommas and Daddys, brothers and sisters all together sharing space and supper. Now we all live separately, secluded by this civilization's renovations where privacy and independence construct walls out of state lines and philosophic differences.
It isn't natural, this separation: separation from instinct, separation from one another. To fill the void, we build online communities of old photographs and type-written jokes. Monitored by advertisers, spell checked by droid dictionaries, we construct digital versions of ourselves. We are no longer people, but catalogues of data. Look around, everyone is addicted, lonely and scared as they stare so intently into screens.
"I told Grandma how I thought you were born in the wrong era." My mother tells me as I wash at the kitchen sink.
Vegan.
Vegetarian.
Flexitarian.
Pescitarian.
Paleo.
Fruitarian.
I am happy to free myself of labels. Currently, if anyone asks, I am a Fooditarian. I once scoured the internet for camaraderie. I traded in the history of my family for a new way of life, one with the most persuasive argument. But nature has shown itself. I thought I could outsmart my inherited digestive system, my milk grown bones, and my sensitive skin, but after two and half vegan years, my thoughtful philosophy was clobbered by the plates of my past.
"You look healthy." My mother tells me.
"Good! I was hoping you'd say that."
When we return to the rustic land of Western Massachusetts, I will purchase my produce from the dirt smudged fingers of farmers, glass bottles of milk from the local dairy and eggs from nearby free-range farms. I will be home again where I belong, near my people.
Saturday, I meet Scott at the airport train station. No more days alone. My person is here. We have two weeks to give Chicago a proper goodbye before we rent a tall truck and practice our geometry with luggage, furniture, crates and cardboard boxes. Then one August morning at 4am, we'll leave the midwest for our little apartment in the green grass of the northeast. But until then, we share cherry pie on a cafe patio, sip pints of yellow beer at the local brewery, watch matinee movies, order deep dish pizza and bicycle to the grocery store. I bake bread and we boil water for coffee. We stay up late, practicing for the formation of our future family. We walk the dog, read our books, play guitar and sing. We prepare for the great swap of our wanderlust youth for stillness.
