i spent the first real day of spring alone –
it was a sunday, full of sunshine. seemingly everyone was out: every bench and makeshift seating-area occupied for miles along the canal. take-away iced coffees and melting ice-creams in every other passing hand. it felt strange to welcome spring in march. primavera was always romantically reserved for april, my sentimental disposition always inclined for the dismal truth of that t.s eliot poem i revisited yearly: stirring lilacs out of the dead. there was no lilacs yet — too soon, but in every pale face coming out of winter hibernation i saw that faint touch of death being stirred by the spring sun.
i walked the streets with my headphones on and could think of nothing but how alone i was. around me: couples, young and old. its funny how the mind always notices what it desperately lacks (a leftover mechanism from our hunter-gatherer reptilian brains?). i had spent the last week savouring the last installment of deborah levy’s autobiographical trilogy and could think of nothing else. feeling the book at the bottom of my bag (comfortably resting next to the bagel i had brought with me), it was as if it had a gravitational field of its own, urging me to continue.
as i sat down beside the canal (finally having found a vacancy), i took a bite of my bagel and started reading my book. but i had to close it a minute later. hardly a page in and the book had seemingly hit me in the face. bruised by this line from deborah’s best male friend: helena and i know how to share a day together. i am not sure you know how to share your day. you know, just pootling along with someone else. you are not capable of it.
[like a sucker-punch to the solarplexus]
i felt strangely undignified on the behalf of deborah. because here i was, particular and inflexible and rigid, most definitely unable to share a day with someone. incapable of just pootling along. particular because the kind of bagel i had brought with me (only one store in the area carried that flavour — and i had made the trek earlier in the morning). inflexible because i always took the long way into town (knowing it was the most scenic, least crowded walk). and third: rigid, because i had spent the last 30 minutes on the hunt for the perfect bench to sit down and enjoy my bagel upon (sunlit, had to have a backrest, must be leeward). as i felt undignified, overwhelmed by these thoughts, it hit me: how could my rigid self share a day with someone when i could not even be flexible on where to consume my particular bagel?
a lonely walk a lonely read and a lonely bagel. in her book, deborah continuously circles back to the female on the high-horse: sontag, duras, de beauvoir. women determined, clear, and unwavering in their morals and behavior — consequently often found ruffling the feathers of disapproving others. i found myself asking: does the high-horse equate high-standards? if so, i felt despairingly isolated perched on the sweeping view my particularities had built for me. but being inflexible on the quality in which i want to lavishly live my life — what is so wrong with that? i want silk sheets to sleep upon or i want nothing at all, exempting reason. but then again (always that inherent geminian double-sidedness), are my high standards simply an excuse for what is really an innate inflexibility?
that night i went to bed in my cold silk-sheets. a body sore from the days horseback-riding. i wanted another body beside this lonely one. laying beneath the eye of an icy full moon, the white light turning the rippling folds of the silk into an ocean of cool uncaring waves, i returned to that haunting sentence: i am not sure you know how to share your day (…) you are not capable of it.
[the question clouded my sleep like the oncoming of a restless hangover, echoing around in the vast caverns of my mind, resolutely enduring through both dreaming and wakefulness: was i capable of sharing my day? was i capable of shaping myself around the schedule of another person?]
the answer would arrive (as it always does), with a characteristic punch of unexpected synchronicity the following sunday –
the day of the equinox. yet another day on which seemingly everyone was out to enjoy the blushing summer weather. i and a best male friend of my own spent the day together, unplanned, inadvertently — the best kind. i bought a sandwich because i hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and he had brought coffee in a thermos in an effort to cure a hangover.
we sat by the riverside, talking, not-talking, sunbathing. it felt peaceful, not strained at all — blissfully contrary to the way some social situations can feel. the quiet was soothing, not a restless void that had to be filled by mindless chatter. when we talked we talked of things that had a meaning beyond the current moment: of siblings, of dreams. of the existential anxiety we were both feeling at the time, what with the looming shape of summer around the corner. after a while we left. both not having a sense of how long we had been there, feeling that same sense of suspended timelessness that comes from too much sun and heat. i had to pick up a book, he had to get groceries. we walked slowly, without hurry, as if the languid summer had already decided to inhabit our faintly sun-kissed bodies.
ive always thought of running errands as the most intimate form of bonding: here, i now reveal myself to you with what kind of milk i buy, how i tell if a watermelon is ripe or not. i helped him choose ingredients for pasta (chili, zucchini, spinach, feta, pine nuts), and felt a burst of gratitude at this show of trust. walking along the citrus aisle i sensed a contentment i hadn’t felt for a long while. i looked down into the basket, filled with both our stuff mingled together — impossible to tell which lemon belonged to who. i thought, a little rebelliously, that if i could share a basket of groceries i knew i was capable of sharing a day with someone. this heavy basket of food, overflowing and intermingling, was my proof of that fact.
the sun had started to set when we stepped out of the supermarket. making our way through the hazy streets, he accompanied me to my bike. hugged me goodbye. i cycled home with my hair trailing behind me in the wind, the last rays of the summer-sun shining on my shoulders. content. pleasantly tired.
i pondered the subject of intimacy, reflecting on the contours of the two contrasting sundays that had passed. i realized that what i had always dreamed of was a perfect run-in with a stranger. the meet-cute, nameless one-night-stand kind. but that is a lazy kind of closeness. a junk-food intimacy, a false copy of the real thing — because what could be more lacking in proximity than a body unfamiliar to your own? real intimacy requires knowledge. the sharing of details worth exposing. a mutual understanding that comes from the lowering of every bridge and crumbling of every brick until you are left naked in the center. exposed: this is my worst habit, this my most unflattering angle. real intimacy comes from the knowing of things that are only to be discovered through the sharing of mundanity, insights that are only to be glimpsed over the sharing of breakfast — seeing the shape of a person by how they peel an orange, how much butter they put on their bread. do you prepare your coffee with a french-press? drip? percolator or perhaps a moka? pass me the honey as you tell me about the thing you heard on the radio and the not-so-funny joke your professor made about kierkegaard. what you had for lunch yesterday and what you saw on your commute. let me pretend i can reveal you to me by the study of these habits: the small magic of the mundane, the beauty of the overlooked.
if it is one thing i am convinced of it is this: that a person can be revealed in these seemingly tiny and insignificant occurrences. seen through — witnessed — in the thread-bare ordinalities of life.
i parked the bike, walked up to my flat with the heavy bag of groceries. stopping on the last step of the stoop. and as always, lingered a little longer in the sun, smiling. sending a prayer of gratitude into the universe.
i knew how to share my day with someone. the day was proof of that.
but i knew how to be alone too.
and i realized that this was the flexibility of the high-horse-riding woman: to know when i wanted to share and not, that the day was ultimately my own to choose how to shape.
i spent the last of what remained of that sunday with deborah. cooking pasta al limone as the evening crept into my kitchen, savouring every bite and every word and every last ray of sunshine.
i went to bed in my silk sheets that felt neither warm nor cold, just close: intimate. wonderful in their temperate, magical mundanity.
