The Room With No Furniture

There is an old woman on the corner of my street. She is there most mornings. Selling flowers from a bucket - carnations mostly, the cheap kind, the kind people buy out of obligation. Weddings. Funerals. The occasions that require flowers rather than want them.

Nobody stops.

I pass her every time I go to the gym. I passed her today. She wasn't looking for customers. Just standing there, holding her coat closed with one hand, watching the street the way you watch something you've seen a thousand times and stopped expecting to surprise you.

I kept walking.

I don't know why she stayed with me all the way to the gym. Through the warm up, through forty minutes of cardio, through the shower. But she did.

It wasn't pity. I want to be clear about that. She didn't look like she needed saving. She looked like she was exactly where she had decided to be.

That's the part I can't shake.

The deciding.

Because I decided too. It didn't come from nowhere. There were reasons. Specific ones, with names and faces and things said at the wrong moment that I still hear sometimes when the apartment is quiet. There were relationships - with men, with women, the whole complicated spectrum of ways you can let someone in and watch it go wrong. Some ended badly. Some ended worse. One ended in a way I still don't have the right word for.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, without making a formal announcement, I stopped. Not dramatically. Not with a declaration. Just gradually, quietly, arranged my life so that there was nobody in it with any real claim on my time. No one who would notice if I didn't come home. No one whose Thursday intersected with mine in any meaningful way.

I told myself it was freedom. And it is. The freedom is real. I can eat at eleven pm or not eat at all. I can be in a bad mood without it becoming someone else's problem. I can leave any situation at any time and nobody gets hurt. That option is always on the table. I find that comforting in the way people find emergency exits comforting - you hope you never need it but you want to know where it is.

But here is the thing about freedom nobody tells you. Freedom is a room with no furniture. Technically you can do anything in it. Practically you just stand in the middle, turning slowly, aware of all the space.

I've been standing in the middle of the room for a while now.

And the old woman on the corner cracked something open this morning because I looked at her and thought — is that it? Is that what deciding looks like at seventy? Eighty? Standing alone on a cold corner with a bucket of flowers nobody wants, holding your coat closed, watching the street with the expression of someone who stopped expecting it to surprise them?

Because that's the thing I don't say out loud. The thing underneath the chosen solitude and the freedom and the emergency exits. I am terrified. Not of being alone right now, in this apartment, in this city, at forty-five. I can manage forty-five. Forty-five still has options. Forty-five can still walk into a room and change it.

I am terrified of fifty-five. Of sixty-five. Of the apartment being exactly the same in ten years - same Ikea furniture, same coffee maker, same view of the building across the street - except the face in the mirror is different and the options are fewer and the room with no furniture is larger and colder and the echo is worse.

I am terrified of having chosen this so thoroughly, so deliberately, so many times in a row, that un-choosing it is no longer possible. That the muscle has atrophied. That I've forgotten how to let someone have a claim on my Thurday. That the next person who tries gets the same walls, the same exits, the same careful management of distance that I've perfected over years of practice.

I am terrified that I am very good at this and getting better.

And I know - I know - that this is the part where I'm supposed to say something. Make a decision. Have an insight. Write the paragraph where it clicks into place and I understand something about myself I didn't understand before. That's what essays are for. That's the contract. You read someone's mess and at the end there's a point.

I don't have one.

I went to the gym. I came home. The old woman was still on the corner on my way back, still holding her coat, still watching the street. I almost stopped. Almost bought the carnations. I don't know what I would have done with them. Watched them for a few days. Thrown them out when they started to go.

I kept walking.

It's Thursday. The apartment is quiet.

I am forty-five and I am absolutely terrified and I would not change a single thing. I don't know what to do with that except write it down and hope that someone somewhere reads it and thinks — oh. Me too.

That would be enough. That would be almost enough.

-Laura