Probably Forever

I have stopped setting the table for two the way you stop expecting a train that hasn't run this route in years. Not grief. Just scheduling. An adjustment of logistics.

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Here is what they don't tell you about learning to be alone:

at some point it stops being something you are learning.

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I know the particular silence of a Sunday that belongs entirely to me, its weight and texture, the way it fills the rooms without apology, without asking where I want to go for dinner, without any of the small negotiations that love requires of the people brave enough or bewildered enough to keep attempting it.

I am not brave enough.

I have made my peace with that.

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Probably forever used to sound like a sentence.

Now it sounds like weather. Permanent, yes, but also simply the conditions under which I exist — the climate I have built a life inside of, learned to dress for, stopped arguing with.

You can argue with weather. The weather doesn't care. The weather just keeps being what it is.

I have decided to be what I am.

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There are things I have kept from every person who ever tried to stay. Not maliciously. Just — mine. The thoughts I think at 2 a.m. The way I need an hour alone after any hour with people. The specific shape of my own company, which I have come to prefer the way you prefer the coffee you make yourself, which is always exactly right, which is never a compromise, which you drink in a quiet kitchen with no one explaining to you how you should have made it.

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I am not lonely the way I used to be lonely.

I used to be lonely like a question — is there something wrong with me, is there something missing, is this the shape of a life or is this what it looks like when a life doesn't work?

Now I am lonely the way a house is empty. Just a fact of the space. Nothing wrong with the house. Nobody home.

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Probably forever.

Okay.

I have good light in the mornings. I have learned to cook for one without it feeling like a consolation. I have read more books than I can count in a silence so complete it had texture.

I have become very interesting company.

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The acceptance didn't arrive clean. It didn't arrive at all, really — it accreted, the way silt accretes, the way a shoreline slowly becomes itself through nothing more dramatic than time and the consistent presence of water.

I woke up one day and the probably forever was just the view from the window. Mine. Entirely mine. Not a wound. Not a warning.

Just the window. Just the light. Just me, standing in it, taking up the exact right amount of space for one person who has finally, finally stopped trying to make herself the right amount of space for two.