Entering the season of self
I was sitting on a blanket in the sun today and I was telling a friend how I had developed the art of serial monogamy without missing a beat – yet there were always flashes of time when it was just me. At 20, on a ferry going to Ship Island, I leaned back and watched the Gulf gently toss us to and fro – I was light and giddy and perfectly unattached. At 24, sitting on the back steps of my shotgun apartment ($265/month) on General Pershing after divorcing my first husband – smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee under the shade of a very old pecan tree – I was there, by myself, at peace. It wasn’t until I was 47, divorced from my third husband, before I had the next glimmer – and that was riding a bike in Mississippi counting roadkill in my head – I was there, by myself, content.
So now at 54, I am digging the solace of me, myself and I. Even though today, the woman speaking to me said she had raised her two children all by herself and never in a million years would she have thought she’d be single for this long. I told her I always had someone when I left someone and she said, “That’s not about them, that’s about you. You had not found peace inside of you.”
Au contraire, I told my French friend, I had found it, but it was fleeting because I couldn’t sit with it – I was not calm in my youth. I had wild romantic notions and lustful loins and I only envisioned myself as a semicircle, incomplete.
