August 7 – 30, 1997
I don’t remember when I first noticed that I live alone. Really alone. Maybe it was when I bought my first house by myself. Or maybe it was when I noticed that it had been about three months since I had used a plate, preferring instead the decadence of eating “takeout” over the sink while talking on the phone.
When I was growing up, I loved the stories of ten-year-old Pippi Longstocking, who lived alone without parents or rules in an enormous dilapidated house. She baked cookies the size of her kitchen floor and ate them all day long. When I was eight, I reread often a story about a boy who left the suburbs and moved to a mountain to subsist by himself inside the trunk of a tree. With his trained falcon on his shoulder, he foraged for berries. Although these images of living alone remembered from my childhood have been eclipsed by the more complex realities of my adult experiences, somewhere, deep down, I recognize the relative joy of controlling my own space and marking my own time.
The most recent census report documents that there are more than twenty-five million of us living alone in this country. We have nothing in common. We have everything in common. We live in big cities and small towns. We eat over the sink and in bed and sometimes at a table. We find things where we left them. We always know where the good scissors are. We own the remote control. We are the people who sometimes celebrate holidays alone. We sing out loud when we play CDs. We talk to our pets. We are sometimes lonely. We are often successful and driven. We are sometimes poor and trapped. We have good friends. We have lovers. We are old. We are young. We are gay and straight. We are divorced, widowed, single, living on opposite coasts from our partners.