When I moved into my tiny top-floor studio flat in 2018, it was a blank page. After the removal men had gone, I stood in the middle of the one-room apartment, just me and my boxes and bed linen in bin bags, and worked out I could walk the length of the place in nine steps. Still, it was mine, just mine (for as long as I was willing to pay the extortionate rent).
For the previous eight months, I had been living on a blow-up bed in a box room in the home of my enormously generous friends and their baby son. After a lengthy period of mental ill health (with a stint in a psychiatric hospital followed by a bad breakup and a period of unemployment), I was taken in by my friends, who treated me as one of the family and helped me heal. When it was time to move on, I thought living alone would give my mental health the best chance of continued recovery. It could be a retreat, a place where I didn’t have to pretend to be well, or sane, if I wasn’t. A place where I didn’t have to “belong”.
Mostly, I enjoyed it. Going to work every day was a regular, enforced break from being alone and I was out of the flat more often than I was in it. I travelled and socialised and sat in bars, but coming home was always a relief: a deep exhale. I could sleep at odd hours and have the washing machine on in the middle of the night and leave the dishes until the next day, or even the day after that.
Sometimes, however, the quiet times stretched out ominously in front of me. On the odd weekend where there was nothing much happening, or during the marathon that is January, or when I was ill, the solitude felt like a long, dark highway.
Then came lockdown, forcing us all to embrace the great indoors. I taught myself the guitar (with apologies to my neighbours), I made a quilt for some friends, I talked and laughed on Zoom and FaceTime and Houseparty. I was resilient and strong in my isolation. But as the weeks seeped into months, the skies lightened in the evenings. What was once a life full of vibrant characters had become my own dull monologue. With no garden, I felt small, diminished, vacuuming up the dust made by my own decay rather than watching things grow and bloom. I was jealous of my flat-sharing friends who were seeing out the pandemic in communion rather than going it alone. I knew that if there was a choice, I would rather do it their way in future.
And then my friend Andy asked me if I wanted to rent the spare room in his flat. He has a garden, a little allotment plot, a big telly and a bigger record collection. Plus, he said: “Sometimes it’s nice to know that there’s always someone else who can pop out and buy the milk.” He is right, of course, and so next week I will move in with him and these four walls will house someone new; someone taking their own diversion into solo living. Good luck to them, I think. But for me, the time has come to venture back into belonging again.
from Lifestyle | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32enSan
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