My most recent dip into singlehood has brought on a crisis of self that has me oscillating between loud, psyched-to-be-single, fuck-all-y’all bluster and weak, aimless, what-have-I-done-with-my-life blubber. It’s tiring and pathetic. I sense that I look haunted, like my own life just exploded in my face. I’ve used up a lifetime of goodwill with my friends, who listen to my endless complaints and justifications and help me deconstruct the breakup again and again.
I work from home now; with no office to go to, I’m a singular outlier in the publishing industry and that’s only intensified the isolation. I pity the coworker who calls me with a simple question, because I am a talker, and I will keep that conversation going until it no longer serves a purpose.
I’ve started doing a fair amount of yoga to give myself a break from an irritating what do I do now? thought cycle. It works; while I’m in class I stop thinking, let myself be light and powerful, let my mind be an empty room with an open door. Later, of course, the room floods again, with all the junky questions I ask myself about dating and love and the future: How can there be anyone dateable out there whose variables align with mine? A single person nearing forty who is not gunning toward having kids, who finds me funny, likes my brain, and can handle my all-or-nothing dating style? Whose humor, intellect, and face I can admire? Whose plans for the immediate future might somehow fit with mine?
Being at home all the time is stifling, so I go out. As raw and on the surface as my emotions have been, people piss me off, but I seek them out anyway. Happy couples are problematic. Men are revolting, a bunch of self-absorbed babies who seem to think I should be competing for their interest.
I know it’s unhealthy and futile, but I fret about getting old. I think of Seth, still in his twenties and living free, and feel jealous, like he sponged up the best I offered and left me to stagger, purposeless, into my forties. But whatever it was I offered, I did so freely, maybe blindly. Now my job is to extricate myself from the circle of regret I’m treading.
I picture a possible alternative to this consternation: Someday, when PennHenge and I go our separate ways, I’ll buy a tiny bungalow not too far from the beach or on some alpine lake and hide out there for another twenty years. I’ll hang up my landlady uniform and go off to this new place, luxuriantly stretch out on a lawn chair in the yard. I’ll do yoga on the porch. I’ll run trails with my dog. I’ll garden like a maniac. I’ll happily ignore the latest technology. I’ll travel. I’ll ride a rusty bike around my neighborhood and be that nice lady who lives alone and says “Hi” to everyone, even though no one says “Hi” anymore.
I can see the house on its pad of green grass rolling out in front of me, and it looks wonderful. I climb the stairs and step onto the porch, knock on a window, shade my eyes to look inside. It’s sparse but warm, colorful, dotted with art. Flowers. Patterns. Plants. The older me is in there, writing, reading, or taking my time while cooking something labor intensive, just out of sight. I imagine those quiet, unscheduled days stacked up and waiting. Having time to linger in my own existence, relaxed into the aloneness.
But what about babies? The thought cycle cuts back in, scraps the self-affirming visualization. Do I want to have babies? Now or never, dude.
No, I tell myself, I’ve always said I probably wouldn’t, right? Why am I second-guessing this now?
Well, obviously, it’s because I’ve recently been dumped. I’m wondering if I blew my chance, if I’ll die alone, you know, the most basic nagging questions.
When my thoughts become unguarded, the coiled snake of my brain lunges out to order me back to self-interrogating.
I have no answers with which to placate this inner dialogue, so I turn down its volume by drinking Vinho Verde with Dan and Steve, meditating, reading, and listening to music. In order to avoid penning email confessionals to Seth, Dan suggests that I rearrange my apartment and buy some furniture. I swap my office and bedroom; sleeping in a new room feels good. I cook myself nice food and spare no effort in doing so. I decide to resurrect my dusty stereo and buy some life-affirming music. My turntable needs a new needle, so one chilly, sunny afternoon, the old cartridge in my pocket, I take the five-minute walk to the nearest record store. The owner, Dave, is standing on the sidewalk in conversation with someone, a fact I overlook as I yell out, “Hey! There’s the guy I’m looking for!”
If my mom were to concoct a pickup line, this is what she would come up with.
But I wasn’t trying to throw come-ons at him. I really was just trying to get a new needle and shake off my solitude for five minutes. It was the end of winter, and most days I barely verbalized at all. I was forgetting how to speak to people without jumping all over them, pent up like a crated puppy. We talked for a few minutes. Dave guided my buying decisions; he tried to give me a discount; I refused it. I knew he and his ex had broken up around the same time that Seth and I had split, and he knew it too, so we were kind to each other, but kept it light.
Shortly after that interaction, a common Providence thing started to happen. Dave and I ran into each other more in a few weeks than we had in five years. Being single again, we were both going out, pretending everything was cool, socializing, but it was more than that. In a small city like Providence—one with a teeming music and art scene—you can think of someone you’d like to see, go to a public place, and conjure him up. You can make her choose to do the very thing you’re doing that night; compel them to stop into that particular bar on that particular night. Part of it is a pleasantly proportional relationship between the number of appealing things to do on a given evening and the high number of like-minded people up for attending said events. The rest is just Providence, something subliminal, some kind of kismet that can’t be quantified other than in our dreams. Providence lifers attest to having dreams in which the city where we live becomes an amusement park, a futuristic utopia, or an enclave in the clouds. “It was Providence, but it wasn’t Providence,” we say. The dream cast includes our friends, our exes, our mentors, our enemies, and they wave and smile beatifically, all debts and slights forgiven.
Out in the real city, the one with many faults and many magnificent people, Dave seems to be everywhere. I like the crinkly, smiley corners of his eyes; I like his voice. He’s funny, charismatic, excitable, and full of life. Thoughtful. Game for the joyful wasting of time. Someone who will always take the conversation to an unforeseen place.
We’re pleasantly keyed in, a good conversational fit. It’s fun to realize I get along well with this person, especially after having seen him around town for years. Still, I barely know him, and although he is intriguing, I’m hanging back. No phone numbers are exchanged, no feverish texting or Snapchatting commences. It goes on like this for a while.
On one of my run-ins with Dave, we get into a discussion of our local minor league baseball stadium, a slightly dumpy old concrete fortress where the crowd is scrappy and fun, and the experience campy. We make lax plans to “maybe” see a game “sometime soon,” but there is a stunning lack of urgency on both sides. A month later, we finally exchange phone numbers and make a plan to go.
Even with the long wait, I’m not prepared for it. It happens to be Star Wars Night at the ballpark, which means a rare sold-out crowd and roving bands of overstimulated children dressed as Han Solo. Dave has a disposition to match: he heckles the players, he loudly claps, cheers, sings, and complains about the lethargy of the fans seated in our section; he has all of the kids in the vicinity laughing and anticipating his next joke. Bit of a handful, this dude, I think, while also smiling nakedly into his face. After the game, we go dancing, and then I drop him off at home, where we talk for another couple of hours. I go home thinking, well, that might have been a thing?
The next few times we talk on the phone, in the late evening as he prepares himself a negroni and goes out to his fire escape to watch the moon, it comes up that we’ve lived most of our adult lives within a mile of one another. We’ve been in the same room countless times, at parties, at shows, at bars, going back to the nineties when he arrived in Providence as a college freshman. I’d seen his bands perform. We track ourselves to this show, that festival, and find that the underpinnings of our lives line up along the same curve.
When you start talking along those lines, things can proceed in one direction only. Having presented ourselves to one another as simultaneously familiar and new, we drift into a carefree summer of beach trips and hikes. It smacks of a revisitation of youth, a nostalgic trip with our former selves, and we claim it without shame.
That year, for the first time in my life that I can recall, it rains heavily, all day, on the Fourth of July. The neighborhood fireworks displays are silenced, shown up by thunder and massive, ripping lightning. Plans are cancelled; grills lay dormant. Dave and I happily spend the day in bed, freed from obligation. As we settle into probably our third nap, we hear another slash of lightning and a very loud and unclassifiable sound. I run to the window and see that a huge bough has torn from the tree just outside and is sprawled on the street. “Holy shit,” I say, yawning, as I return to bed.
Dave lives in a mill building in an old industrial neighborhood once dominated by working factories. It’s a cozy, open space with giant windows off of which he and his roommates have built their own rooms with sleeping lofts. Everyone takes care of the space; they keep it clean, cook together, and do small repairs. It’s a communal living situation that actually works. Dave has filled his corner of “the mill” with records—shelf after shelf of meticulously maintained, carefully arranged records. This is his personal collection—the gems—and it is never to mix with the stuff for sale at the shop. While the records are kept in museum-ready condition, the rest of his room is not subject to such order. Stereo equipment is piled to the ceiling—most of it awaiting one crucial piece before it can be used. His bed is a twin mattress on the floor upstairs; there are a couple of metal poles strung up, between which his clothes are slung. There are a few other bits of furniture, all utilitarian objects in found condition. Books about music, baseball, and philosophy.
His priorities are clear, and I like where they are.
The store, of course, is another record repository. There are the front room records—the stuff for sale—and a slew in storage in the back. There is a hierarchy to the storage and filing system, but it’s not terribly transparent unless you’ve happened to trip and fall into Dave’s brain. I loved going into the store before I knew Dave, and part of what I loved, without knowing it, was his essence incarnate—his down-to-nerd-out, lovable goofball personality—posted up in every corner of the place. The people who worked there were charming and lively and without pretentiousness. The store was home to a range of music I found inspiring and overwhelming, and I’d often go in determined, flip through the stacks, and come out a half hour later, flustered, with a random calypso record—or some other thing I wasn’t sure I wanted—in my hand.
Dave starts bringing records to my house instead of to the mill. We listen to old stuff, new stuff, and we decide which to keep and which should go back into rotation at the store. When I wax poetic about a record that had once been special to me, it is in my hands the next day, wrapped in brown paper, Dave’s handwritten note stuck to it. I lower the needle onto the record, and we lie down on the rug, side by side, in front of the speakers, to get a good listen.
We are building something sturdy. Upon this frame, variables are aligning.