proseofpresence

[proseofpresence]

Mountain Pose: I’m Practicing Alone

I’m practicing aloneness.  If the physicians ahead of me in the Starbucks line, with their buff arms and tight bums, merely practice medicine after 20 years of grueling training, I can practice changing 20 years of dating preoccupation: I love myself.  I am happy with my company.  As I wait for my tall almond milk latte, I imagine being surrounded in white light and focus on beauty: the pungency of oily beans, the hiss of frothing milk, the gratitude for monks who first pressed beans with water.  I try not to look to see if the tall, dark haired doctor- whom I imagine is as bold as his Sumatra roast- is married. Though he’s the embodiment of beauty and checks out my legs as I stride by, I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

I practice on my mat in a yoga class of married, ectomorphic women in designer stretch pants. Just as a I begin to count my breaths from here to nirvana, chatter rambles between my ears about the petite blond next to me wearing a traceable two karat, breathing heavily during Downward Dog: Does she make those sounds during sex? How did she get a man to commit?   I forgive myself by polishing judgment from the diamond in my mind.  I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

Over organic salads, craft drinks, and beach outings, my married girlfriends dish trite, collective advice, which annoys me enough to induce listening.

“Stop looking.  Joe and I met when I was just happy being by myself.  Just love yourself.  When the time’s right, he’ll show up.  Get off online dating.  Let him find you.  Let go.”

Easy to say when you’re spooned nightly by a slightly rotund, balding, legal devotee.  

Ironically, none of my friends know how to love themselves, as evidenced by their addictive habits, childhood anecdotes rife with trauma, and palpable grief for Netflix characters.  

“If we truly loved ourselves, we wouldn’t desire partnership at all,” I tell them.  

Yet, like the time my college dormmates challenged me to down an entire bottle of Boone’s malt liquor and take photos in my padded pushup with strangers (what happened to that disposable camera?), I give in to peer pressure: this non-doing is another form of doing I have yet to try, so I give it a go.  Desiring to not desire is still desire, my superconscious says, while I consciously roll my eyes at myself, only to hug and rock my singledom from side to side in Knees-To-Chest.  I love myself.  I am happy with my company.    

The only people who don’t give me advice are my parents who, after 43 years of marriage, attest to the power of sensuality.  They met at a high school dance in the late 60s.  As he places Abbey Road on the turntable and sips on chianti, Dad insists, “Mom got fresh and tried to hold my hand on the dance floor.”  

Mom vehemently denies this and rolls her eyes, as she makes him a plate of cheese, olives, and Italian bread, assuring me that, “Your father pursued and wooed and never let me put my hand in my pocket for anything.”  

I smile duteously for the thirtieth time, secretly wondering how I was conceived from such a fairytale, and why I’m relegated to swiping left on Randall, who posts self-aggrandizing shirtless photos in bed and trophies an illegally caught grouper above his head.  Perhaps it’s college karma fifteen years late.  

Staring out the glass sliders to see Dad hosing Mom’s orchids and birds of paradise, I realize no one’s touched my hand in five months. No one’s asked me to dance since last year, when I went out with the red bearded foreman (what was his name again?) who swiped right on me and, subsequently, on my left breast on the dance floor.  A few dances and drinks in, our make out session was unexpectedly interrupted by his ex, a high barfly.  

“You’re so pretty,” she slurred and close talked as her jaw pounded in fast rhythms, “why are you with him?”  

Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover, something in the way she woos me...  

Sadness upsurges unexpectedly in my chest.  To avoid crying, I hold a pitted olive between my fingers, stare at its roundness, pop it in my mouth, and revel in its firmness.    I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

At 38, attending a six-week English graduate program on a remote Vermont mountain requires a balance between downsizing and realism.  I’m too old to capsize my mid-maintenance lifestyle into one suitcase, and I’m too lazy to drive from Florida.  Hence, the purchase of an auto train ticket.  I only allow myself two variations of the essentials to fit into three plastic crates and a large garment bag.  I’m sure 19th Century waggoneers seeking squatters’ rights set similar parameters, considering they never knew when a barn dance would occur. This reasonable rule, of course, does not pertain to t-shirts, jewelry, vitamin supplements, or coffee pods.  These items are a form of self-care and facilitate self-love, I tell myself, while trying to puzzle together high heels with a NutriBullet and facial steamer. I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

We introduce ourselves- the “singletons” as the smiling attendant calls us- while the dinner car speeds past hidden inlets and mobile homes of the southern Carolinas.  The two Baby Boomers, about ten years apart in age, are pulled backward by the train, a reversal that would cause me to lose my braised chicken dinner.  John, the older, smaller statured gentleman, sits across from me; and Kent, whose left eye bulges with blood post ocular surgery, sits across from Lin, a disheveled, yawning anesthesiology resident who mumbles as she speaks.  I worry, as she talks the most excitedly and clearly all meal about “having a person’s autonomic functions in [her] hands,” that she might pass out in the middle of the procedure or our dinner.  After Kent starts talking about his drug experimentation in the 60s, which interests Lin because she “aced pharmacology,” I engage John in the hopes that Kent stops obsequiously staring at my breasts.  

With a slight smile, John tells me he’s a Snow Bird returning to upstate New York for the summer until his upcoming trip to Norway, Sweden, and Finland.   Grateful that he’s well-traveled- to divert me from making eye contact with Kent, who’s tried to get my attention a few times- we chat about our favorite places.

“Bora Bora is all it’s cracked up to be,” he says staring out the window in a moment of fond reminiscence.  “I took a cruise to islands in the area with an elite line: only fifty people on the ship.   I got to know everyone.  Good for a single guy.  The food was fabulous.  Not anything like this menu, which hasn’t changed in the eight years I’ve been taking the train.  Pharmaceutical sales- though I was technically a drug dealer- was good to me.”  

I like that he speaks in complete thoughts with a bit of oversharing: he doesn’t make this a working dinner for me. By the time melting ice cream and surprisingly decent coffee rattle in front of us, we’ve effortlessly shared stories about South Africa, southern Italy, and Bavaria.  

“I used to travel with someone,” he admits in growing comfort, “but, it’s actually better being on my own.  I like golfing and history, two subjects most women don’t prefer.  The older I get, the more set in my ways I become.  There are certain things I need to travel with.   Sometimes I like it to just be quiet.   I like my company. I never really hit it off with someone for more than two weeks.  Marriage, it seems, just wasn’t in the cards.”  

For a second, I wish the train was moving us into another timeline, one where we meet in the middle of our loveless histories, two singletons of a similar age looking out windows in search of the other.  Just before the silence goes on for too long, grief wells in my eyes as I think of a man I miss, of a similar name somewhere in Africa, who tinkered around my house for two weeks fixing things and me, who wasn’t in my cards.   I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

“You are just like the shrink on Billions.  I just love her.  So smart and sexy,” Kent interjects, pulling me into the present, as the attendant clangs dirty plates away, and he slurps his remaining chardonnay. “If you want to chat later, I have one of those privacy cots in car 5325.”

“No thank you,” I assert as an unexpected confidence rises in my throat.   “I am happy with my company.”  

All I can think about is his bulging eye and how Paul Giamatti would likely never drink chardonnay.  All I can do is imagine him surrounded in white light and thank him, by touching my heart, for focusing on my beauty.  

I’m living aloneness in my single dorm room, while taking black and whites of deserted churches and barns, in writing at the lone coffee shop, while searching for a meal that isn’t pub grub, in suffering no cell service, while spending $50 on two bags of groceries, in doing laundry from a coin operated machine, while profusely sweating no air conditioning, in missing Dad play dress-up with my nieces, while seeing photos of Mom cradling her new puppy, in lamenting the closest yoga studio is an hour away, while listening to low-maintenance strangers during communal dinners, in reading Titus Andronicus’ bloody demise, while running past Robert Frost’s diverging wood, in letting go of the fantasy of meeting my husband amid fireflies, while breathing out the fear that this is all there is and will ever be.  I love myself.  I am happy with my company.

#modernlove #30sdating #vermont #yoga #selflove #proseofpresence #poetryofpresence