Living alone can be a daunting and liberating experience. Although it hasnt been a very long time that I have started to live alone, so much so that I can call myself an expert, but every now and then I hit upon some realities of the experience. And the rewards too.
My mother keeps asking me every now and then, "what is it like to live alone ?" A regular question, to which I dont have the right answer. Sometimes I sound genuinely happy when I tell her that it is great. Then there are times when I struggle to keep that happy tone in my voice, lest she gets worried. I think she senses realizes that, but I give her credit that she lets me be. She is intrigued that I chose to live without room-mates and was worried for the longest time. But I think she has realized that I am doing pretty okay.
Living alone means you have to reach out to the world. Unless you want to, no one can bother you or be-friend you. I have always had room-mates and apartment-mates. Some of my longest-lasting friendships have been with people I have lived with in my student days. I have never struggled to make friendships because I guess I have never picked and chosen. I have made friends very organically. Now, I face the challenge of being alone in a big city, and trying to make friends who I can hang-out with. I try to consciously avoid too much socializing with my work people, because unfortunately conversation mostly hovers around work. After putting-in 60 hours of work in the week, I cannot stand office talk of any kind. So much so that I'd rather go home and watch a movie or read a book, than going out with my colleagues. Doesnt mean they aren't great. Some of them are real fun, and it definitely taken two people to make a conversation interesting. So I guess 50% responsibility lies with me, to talk to someone and have an interesting conversation. And I find myself less keen to even try. There was a time when I was a sucker for an interesting conversation. Now I am happy to sit back and not talk at all. Cant figure out the reason. And honestly, there is no reason. Thats just me, for now.
There are times when I feel the need of a room-mate. What if my cable guy come to fix my cable or the electrician comes to fix my gas. Living with a room mate might have meant we try to work our schedules around these necessities and each one of us share equal responsibility. Now living alone means you still have to work your schedule around such emergencies, without having anyone to share the burden with !
I have also formed a bond with my furniture. Sounds weird. But it is true. Someone had told me this when he was living alone. He recently moved-in with an apartment mate because he was done talking to his furniture and forming a relationship with them. I now know what he meant. I say good bye to my house and its contents every day and tell them that I will see them in the evening. I kinda enjoy that.
That same person also asked me how I feel when I see my friends with their family, especially having babies. I like kids. I baby-sat some of my friend's kids in grad school. I love kids but as long as I dont have to deal with them 24X7, which is what motherhood is about. There are no breaks or down time. When your baby wakes-up at 2am, just when you were entering into that deep slumber mode, wailing and wanting to be fed, an understanding and helping husband, a great house-help or even a God-send mother is of no use. YOU have to get up and feed your baby. Either the maternity gene has skipped me, or is yet to wake-up in me. Either way, I love babies (notice how often I am saying that, just to convince myself, perhaps !).
But before a baby, comes the baby's father, meaning my husband. Meaning I would have to find someone to marry me. Means I need to find someone I would like to be with, for a long time. Yes sure, one can go the surrogate way, but I'd really like to raise a child with another person. More hands to help. I dont mind adopting, and have always given a serious thought about it, rather than having my own one. I am not crazy about my own genes. But no matter who the baby is, I'd like to have someone who feels an equal responsibility towards that kid. Which brings me to the thorny issue of the side of my life that..wells to put it mildly, has been the most difficult aspect of my life.
I haven't written much about it, although there have been subtle hints. To be honest, I havent been able to write much about it. I am amazed that I give myself so many chances and yet, every single time, I fall flat on my face. I take a leap of faith, and unfailingly crash badly. Today, I find it a little bit easier to look back the past year and a half and not go into a cesspool of self-pity and tears. I realized it is a little easier to get over someone when you are in a new city. Although being alone in the city can make you miss that person all the more. But I think I have managed to do the earlier. There are no lingering memories of any specific place in the new city. I am almost afraid to go back to my own city because of this.
I believed in the phrase, "Love is good, wherever you find it". When you choose to love someone (who loves someone else, and has made that really clear to you), this can be considered a mark or strength or a sign of weakness. I dont know which one it was for me. I knew everything when I walked into it. I give him enough credit to be honest with me on that part. Yet, I couldn't help myself but love him for what he was - twisted, broken, childish, hurt, angry. And the greatest of all, he made me feel needed. Perhaps, that was a balm to soothe my soul that was hurt. The hurt I was carrying from my past relationship, at being left at a time when I needed someone to have a little faith. Perhaps I wanted to find salvation for my past mis-deeds, and I tried to do that by letting someone make me stay in his life purely because his love had left him and he needed someone. Someone to be with, hang-out with, talk to at 3am. Someone who would not demand much, but be happy to stay beside him and support him. I was all that, purely because deep down, I found myself hurting less when he told me he needed me, even though he would always love someone else. He said that he wanted to stay with me, but that his heart would always belong to someone else.
I struggled with that for a long time. I tried to walk away, because that is what any self-respecting person would do. But I went back every time because I wanted to be needed. I could take the liberty of saying that sometimes I felt loved too. Those were precious moments.
Today, someone would ask why did I walk away after all this time. I might as well gone on like that. But then, every now and then a victim of a violent relationship either walks away or decides to fight back. I had nothing to fight back for. Reality was always in front of me. I might also be stretching it a bit by bringing-in the violent relationship bit. Violence doesnt always mean a physical violence. It could also mean that someone hurts you knowingly, and then when you try to find the courage to walk away, uses your weakness against you to make you stay back. My greatest weakness was that I had a deep-seated desire to be needed, and that was used against me. I couldn't make a scene and scream or shout at him. I was quietly hurting and he knew that. Yet he chose to do nothing. That bit, I am really sad about. And that is probably why I finally turned away. I could not find it in me to see him even as a friend. A friend would not do that to another friend. We are all humans and we have our follies. But we do not hurt others knowingly. We do not repeatedly hurt them or jerk them around. We could do that once, or twice. By mistake. But when it becomes a repetitive behavior, then there is something wrong. I dont think he is a bad person. Having lost his father at a very early and impressionable age, and then going from the most popular guy in school to being suspended from school, having a grieving young mother and a family that was crumbling around him, he has had to deal with a lot and has always had a view that life has been unfair to him by taking his father away so early. I saw that grieving person in him many times and I felt like protecting him from the world, telling him that I would let no one hurt him. But one can only do so much and he is afterall a grown-up person. And I could not protect him at my own cost.
The only thing that has sustained me in my previous broken relationships is, to think that the person who has left me is probably happier now. I cannot imagine someone staying with me and being unhappy about it. It is a personal insult and demeaning.
I am not in love with him anymore, and I am still in that place where there are good days and bad days. The bad days are when I see myself as a loser, someone who has always been left off. The good days, well, are the days when I dont feel like a loser. There is a certain point in life when you feel, "alright, there aint any silver lining in what happened with me. It was just life that happened, so get over it and move on."
My folks are visiting me in two weeks, so I need to finish the vodka in my refrigerator. And sorta parent-proof my house. How does one do that ? Have to figure that out.
I feel broken many times, but then a friend of mine sent a very wise quote by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and John Kessler:
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.”
Sounds good enough to me, for now.
