Cold, damp wintertime edged its way closer and closer into the house, the wood floors beginning to feel sticky under my bare feet from the dampness. I stood washing dishes in front of the window, my mind a million miles away. A red bird caught my eye once and I watched it, my hands still submerged in the grimy water until it hid itself away in the big Cypress tree behind the house.
Winter's darkness almost swallows me up sometimes in this house. Company becomes more rare with every year and I wonder, am I a bad host? Or maybe its that people don't stay in one place very long anymore. Or maybe, maybe I'm happy with my solitude. I tell myself that's it.
I watch TV all day on Saturdays, take my dog out a few times. Aside from my nine to five grind, this is my life. TV on Saturday, laundry on Sunday and a movie just before bed, to ease my mind about starting all over again with Monday.
I go out to lunch with my coworkers and I suppose in a way they're friends, but they don't really know me well and I feel I know too much about them at times. They talk about their husbands and children and how expensive manicures have become, "But I don't care, I'm not giving up this one little thing I do for myself." Doris says. Ugh. If I rolled my eyes every time she said something obtuse I'd look like a broken slot machine.
I do my job fairly well I think. No one ever seems to complain and I get along well with people. I even go to office parties and girls nights and I'm a member of the local Democrats group. There are people all around me all the time when I am in that world, and I enjoy it for a while. The hugs goodbye, the compliments and even the little jabs at my foibles. It's all in good spirit. It makes me feel, at least while I'm there, like I belong.
It takes a long time to truly know someone. I learned this the hard way, lying in bed beside a man who I supposed loved me in his own way. I've never been lonelier than back in those days. I wondered if I knew him at all, and never wondered whether he knew me. We knew one another's likes and dislikes, one another's annoying habits. We knew how to budget together and buy a home and even raise some kids, but even time was not enough for us. We never had the courage to dig deeper, to truly know one another.
Three years ago he died. I found him, slumped at his desk in the study, a Christmas letter in his hand. He died reading about Erma Ponder's youngest son going off to community college. I wondered what line he read last. I even kept the letter for a long time, reading it over and over. The more my eyes followed its lines, the more I began to wonder if he were the sort of man who even enjoyed reading Christmas letters. Did he live his whole life following the dictates of society, just retracing his father's footsteps? I wondered often after his death, if he felt he missed out on anything in life, or was he a simple man, easily satisfied with the most basic things.
We used to sit in separate chairs at night, reading separate books that were nothing alike. In rhythm, we rose from those chairs at 9:00 and turned out the lamps. He showered while I picked out my clothes for the next day, then I showered while he fell asleep in bed. I crawled in beside him a thousand times and slept at times, with my head on his chest, but I never knew his mind.
After I finished the dishes I stepped out on the back porch, still without shoes. The cold wet stones beneath my feet made me feel alive. It was winter time and there I was, outside in my bare feet. It felt good to be free.
Since he died, everyone seems to assume I am lonely. Most of the time, I am not. I occupy myself with TV and housekeeping and of course, my job. I keep an eye out on that boy who is off at college and I talk to the girl most every day.
Solitude is highly underrated.
I slipped back inside the house, closed the back door tight. It was supposed to be a very cold night and the wind already blew hard against the windows of my little house. It blew like whispers, loud and strong at first like a child talking in Sunday School, then soft and sweet, like secrets between lovers. As darkness fell I turned off my lamp and headed for the shower, but on my way through the kitchen something caught my eye.
A bright light, shining through the side window, reflecting off the shiny side of my refrigerator. At first I thought it must have been a flashlight and I almost let myself get scared, but as I moved closer to the window, I saw more clearly.
The clouds that brought so much cold rain early in the day now stretched thin and wispy across the night sky. They floated around a big full moon like spirits, set free from a long oppression. I stood by the window for a moment, trying to feel the moonlight on my skin. Nothing. I looked for a trace of light beyond my closed eyelids, but the moonlight, bright as it was, couldn't penetrate beyond them.
So I slipped off my house shoes and called the dog to follow me and I walked out beyond the porch onto a brown soggy lawn. I sloshed my way through it past the arbor of cherry trees where the kids used to play and stood at my garden gate. And for the longest time I watched the moon and the moon watched me, but neither of us knew what we were watching.
