The Blue Pillow

For the first six months I had nothing but a mattress on the floor, two suitcases, and a cardboard box.  I made my first purchase for the place in November: a shelf for my books, because I kept spilling wine on them when they were just piled against the wall by my mattress.  In January I bought new sheets and I ordered a bed frame.  I had put off doing any such thing for so long because I hadn’t seen the point.  I didn’t want to be living in that room so why would I bother making it look like a place someone would want to live?  But in December I had become lonely in that quiet, maddening way that convinces you that no matter who says they love you—a friend, a boyfriend, your family—they can’t really mean it because love shouldn’t be selfish but people damned sure are—hell, I was.  But with that conviction, came a desperate urge to start over and since moving was out of the question, I signed up for an online dating site. 

That was where I got the idea to fix up my room.  The only person I met through the site was an actor who had just broken up with his girlfriend.  He told me about trying to feng shui his bedroom to attract good karma or something.  I think he eventually got back together with his girlfriend but I think he had the right idea.  And while I didn’t care to move my mattress around to whatever side of the room would attract good energies, it finally made sense to me to make the place nice.  It was going to be hard to feel happy if my room looked depressing and I would probably never have the hope of ever having someone to love and to share my bed with if it wasn’t a place I wanted to be.  So I bought blue sheets because I remembered my mother or Seventeen Magazine once saying that blue is supposed to be a calming bedroom color.  And when it arrived, I pushed the long, bed frame box up four flights of stairs and assembled it by myself, late at night while drinking a beer.  And I didn’t even spill the beer.  Then, one night, I walked thirty blocks in the snow to buy picture frames from a store I had noticed near Bloomingdales; I had nothing else to do and I figured a walk would do me good.  Lastly, I bought a second pillow.  Not that I needed one.  It was just in case.

Sure, I puked red wine all over my new sheets once or twice in January, because I was still lonely and drinking doesn’t fill any void no matter how much you do it.  But it was a start.  And that’s the thing: I think you have to be ready to have what you want before you can get it.  I knew I didn’t want to be going to bars by myself, making up lives and histories that weren’t my own and telling them like truth to the old men who sat beside me drinking Scotch while I sipped Prosecco.  I was just trying to pass the time and there was a certain comfort in the dim glow of a bar and the way the liquor bottles look like gemstones.  And besides, there are all sorts of ways to be alone.  You can go to the gym and to the movies.  And I did.  You can go to restaurants late at the night, after the dinner rush, and sit at the bar and learn to make cocktails by watching the bartender with the practiced, steadied gaze of someone who drinks alone.  And I did.  And you can smile politely and be friendly to people you don’t really like.  But I couldn’t.  Because no matter how lonely I was, I preferred being alone to being with people I didn’t care much for.  And I think that’s the best way to be alone.  Just do it until one day you find you don’t have to anymore.  In March, I needed the second pillow.