POV: You Live Alone on Saturdays

It’s Saturday afternoon and you are alone again. It is springtime in the city. You are between the ages of thirty and forty-five.

You have lived in this apartment for many years, almost a decade. You moved in after arriving from your hometown. Back then, your friends were numerous, complex, and single. They covered the city. From your window, you see the downtown portions where you would meet them after work.

When the pandemic began, your mother called to make sure you were safe. She watched the news from your hometown, your father’s voice heard flipping through commercials. The two of them sat there and you imagined — half imagined, half remembered — the times you spoke to them in college. They were Sunday nights calls, but not long distance. She would answer, put the phone on speaker and he would turn off the TV.

Now, their voices are soft and weightless, like sheets of parchment paper. You would like to listen. You call her, but there is no answer and when you try your Dad, the call goes straight to voicemail.

You decide to wash dishes and place the ones from breakfast in a small pile in the sink. There are not many: a bowl, a plate, a half-stained cup. When you are single, the same dishes are used for months. They become your favorites. There are stacks upon stacks that will never know a human’s touch.

As you rinse them, rain begins against the window and for a moment there are two streams of water. Inside, it is tepid, but the outside one is cold and frightening. You turn around to watch its entrance. You close the tap, dry you hands and walk forward to the living room.

Here, by the couch, you have a sudden urge to nap, but your phone, your holy device, is in the adjacent room, the office, the place where you manage tech sales. You stride in to free it from the charging cable. At the desk are two laptops, a monitor, and an ergonomic chair. You push in the chair and grasp the phone, but there are no messages from anyone, neither friends, family, or colleagues. Everyone is silenced. You are unreachable, and the only voicemails are ones you’ve forgotten to delete.

When you took the job, you envisioned a life, albeit a remote one, where you would talk to people again, and you do, but they are people you are not friends with, and that goes for both groups. With one, you cold call and find clients, sifting through the rolodex of prospective customers and, upon reaching one, quickly onboard them into the bulging, stacked system of software. You meet them and they are lost to you. You will not speak to them after they finish signing up. On the other side remain your colleagues, over a hundred of them on different teams. You think, How strange to be assigned their life? From 9 to 5, you talk to them, but only as it relates to work. The work is making money for someone. The someone is a person, or board of people, you have never met.

Though your laptop is turned off, you unplug it and arrange the desk neatly, removing pens and stray papers. You place things inside drawers and, shutting them, hear the strain of tiny wheels on tracks. With a click, the last one closes. You will not enter this room tomorrow, Sunday, for that is a sacred day of rest.

Turning, you remember the reason you came to the room: to retrieve a novel. It does not matter which one. You have started several in the past months and the latest is sitting at a strange angle by the loveseat. It is top-heavy. One more inch and it will fall awkwardly to the floor.

You pick it up and retreat back into the living room where the gray light finds the floorboards. Across the threshold, the drumming of rain resumes and with a few extra steps you are across and diagonal, toward the door and reaching it, making sure it is locked like a robber who has broken in.

You are inside and there is no one home. You are fortunate that whoever lives here is gone, away for hours leaving everything for the taking.

I am a thumbprint in a digital world, you think to yourself as you grab a sparkling water from the refrigerator, open the bag of pretzels, and dim the lights. There are still several hours until dinner. When the time arrives, you will use Uber Eats or the coupon for DoorDash someone gave you for your birthday.

You take a blanket from the hallway closet. You shuffle to the couch, lie down and crack open the book.

Whether it is the central heating, the rain, or where the two intersect, you soon find yourself in dream of the heavy kind, the kind that is itself a blanket, transforming the one you’re resting under into a kind of forest hearth. There you are in the trap your mind has set for you. You are overgrown with grass and branches and laying between the roots. The roots are tightening like a straight jacket. You are dying, but protected. There is no need to wake up now.

Beside you is the book, the le Carre novel, and like the protagonist you are a committed spy. Years of your life wasted, spread haphazardly upon the dusted pages. They haunt you, but you keep turning. Turning the pages is all you strive for in the shadows of your mind.

Who can say how long it is you lie there, both lying and turning, both resting and running? How long do you stay with no one around to help you wake?

In the twilight, your first thought is Please don’t leave me as you sit up from the sunken cushions. Turning, you see the city lights make circles in the distance. The rain has stopped. You are shivering and pull the blanket around your shoulders.

Scanning the apartment, your mind goes blank. You remember nothing of the past few hours, of the morning, of errands and making breakfast. You panic and begin to sweat. You stand up quickly and move to the office to clock in.

Then, you see the novel on the coffee table and remember the weekend, your routine, the systems you have in place. You see the bookmark like a white flag. You are unplugged and there is no need to power on again. You are overwhelmed with the realization that you can do nothing and be okay with that. You can go out or stay in. You can see people or choose not to see anyone at all.

You are grateful for the notion of freedom even though the freedom produces loneliness. During the pandemic, you became isolated from people and have been isolated ever since. When it happened, you were already depressed because you were struggling to make friends. You were tired of old ones, too. You were tired, frustrated and afraid of moving forward. Someone you liked broke up with you. That was the last straw you collected before things started to shut down.

Now, as raw moonlight glints across the windowpane, you let the tears flow on the day between days. It should have happened months ago. It’s Saturday, you have no plans, and there’s only so much alone time someone living alone can take.

You realize, as you glide gracefully toward the refrigerator, that you may need to quit your job. What if you worked downtown, in an office? You remember interning in offices, in your twenties, in a smaller city miles away.

Back then, there were no apartments or high-rises, just your parents’ house until the internship ended. Your brother was there, too, in high school. It was you, your parents, and your little brother. In between were home cooked meals and watching TV with your Dad.

I miss him, you think. I miss the good ones. What is life without people, you wonder, and you still have a half a weekend to find out.

You ask yourself what you’d like for dinner since it’s only you that is deciding. Scrolling through Uber Eats, your phone vibrates and begins to ring.