Ridiculous, really

“Don’t stay with a boy, and never stay with your boyfriend,” my mother said. Words like ‘reputation’, like ‘face’, like ‘what people will think’ were spoken, over and over again, insistent tones of an un-hung up phone, but words like ‘what you should, and should not do, you know this’ were slid in between the loudness, like tiny stones dropped from the window of a train, her version of subliminal.

But Boyfriend is the quintessential Good Boy, his ‘what you should and should not do’ hacked in stone, and so what she should have told me instead was this; that staying is really living, that the us forgets the I, that a house is always the emptier for having once been filled. And that when you start to miss one person, you end up missing all the rest, and an insomniac, silent night results.

There is, though, in all honesty, a small surprising joy, no, glee, in the solitude. I can change in the living room, avail myself of certain…facilities…with the door wide open so as not to miss a word of House; I can (and did) indulge in all manner of disgusting habits anywhere I pleased, and conduct culinary experiments with fascinatingly revolting results, and no one would complain of starved neglect; I can write.

Finding the I again was unexpectedly scrumptious, and the hour-long just-before-bed phone calls sweetly nostalgic. Boyfriend’s absence is orange peel; not all bitter pith, but also sharply fresh skin, tangy.

Besides, it’s just for two nights, and I am obviously much too prone to self-indulgent melodrama for my own good.