Living La Vida Sola

"Now here you go again

You say you want your freedom

Well who am I to keep you down?"

-Stevie Nicks, Dreams

From the onset of adolescence it has been my dream and driving ambition to live alone, not just independently, but utterly and completely alone, my living space devoid of all sentient beings save me. I can remember holing myself up in my doorless childhood bedroom, waiting out my family members so that I might emerge, a nocturnal creature blinking in the soft light of domesticity, to scrounge for sustenance without being noticed. How I longed for the day when I could return home and sit in silence, having to answer nothing and to no one.

The end of this month marks the fourth glorious and uninterrupted year of me living la vida sola. I was always slated to be the master of my domain: Who used the last of the toilet paper and didn’t see fit to replace it? No sense flying into a psychotic rage. I used the last of it and I’d better boot it to Shopper’s if I know what’s good for me. Coming home after a long day can be stressful and the last thing I want to think about is making dinner. I’ll just reheat last night’s leftovers, I say to myself as I walk through the door. What’s that fridge? They’re exactly where I left them? Nobody ate them? Of course not. Naked house, you say? You bet! I walk around the apartment like a Vegas showgirl morning and night shamelessly on display for the Lebanese Catholic congregants across the street. And so what if I’ve been hogging the computer, watching Steve Perry in tight pants performing Lovin’ Touchin’ Squeezin’* on a three-hour loop? I’ll do it over and over and over … Next up in the guilty pleasure queue, Erasure!**

There is a downside, however, which begins innocently enough. I tend to emote on a grand scale when I walk down the street. People might assume I have a mental health disorder. I talk to myself and praise, admonish and engage inanimate objects in conversation although they are still too reticent to reply. Dirty laundry is scattered across the floor of all rooms of the apartment and I often find the toilet one flush behind. Is this symptomatic of living alone or is this part of a bigger problem? I fear I am losing my civilization and I’ve only just begun. Will I ever be able to live with another person? Do I even want to?

Things get much worse, I’ve been loath to discover.

My father has been living his own version of this glorious dream for nigh on eight years and it seems as though he is regressing to a feral state. He cuts his fingernails in public, sometimes mid-meal in order to achieve ungular “perfection” (the irony being the more he cuts, the worse it gets). He passes gas quite noisily as we pass throngs of the normalized because he feels that keeping the poison inside his body is a health risk. In the darkness of a movie theatre in which he sits, one can often hear the sound of forceful spitting, followed by the clickety-clack of an unpopped kernel bouncing its way down the sloped floor. That’s the noble savage I call Dad dispelling unwanted food from his mouth. What’s worse is that since he started wearing false teeth, he is prone to removing them and blowing and sucking on the plate to remove wayward kernel husks. Horror of horrors! The list of atrocities continues and it’s enough to merit the abusive tirades I lob against him. “Ewww! Can you please not do that in public? Do you see anyone else doing that? What’s wrong with you? Were you raised in a barn?” The re-enculturation of Jenny’s father is proving fruitless.

One of the curse-blessings of being a thirty-year-old woman is the surge in hormones. Not since I was a teenager have a felt these intense highs and lows. My brain and my body are at odds: the former still enjoys its freedom and lebensraum while the latter screams “BREED YOU SELFISH BITCH!!! BREED!!!” My body is working overtime to finalize my enculturation. Without a partner or children, who will be there to keep this wild child in check? The time approaches for me to ask myself to dream again.

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9m_C6jAT7U

** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSMeUPFjQHc