another week fading into dusk

It's on Friday nights when I think about it the most, and always with an odd sense of happiness and nostalgia:  I was so out of place in college -- fraternity boys and sorority girls everywhere one was to turn.  In a place where people all seem to know each other, everyone also notices whomever it is that no one seems to know -- and on that campus, one of those people no one knew would have been me.

Not like in New York, where you can be alone if you want to, even with a total stranger pressed up against you as you brace yourself against the closed door of the lurching, crowded subway train.

Or maybe I'm really just describing the difference between childhood and adulthood.  For me, New York is synonymous with the end of adolescence.  I'd hated college.  Living in the dorms, you couldn't really stay in and write letters to your sister or your best friend on a Friday night, even if that's what you really yearned to do, given, finally, the chance.  Not without taking a lot of flak, that is.

Not that one should be incapable of standing up for oneself, but doing so can take an awful a lot of energy and taint the simple pleasure of finally, after looking forward to it all week, one was left alone.

So in college, I'd avoid those conversations by quietly stealing away to the study hall across campus -- the one that was open all day and night, every day and night, seven days a week.  It was a huge, quiet, "echo-y" room, in a 19th century academic hall, with a high ceiling and a sort of balcony at the top from which people upstairs could look down on the even rows of long tables punctuated by desk lamps that gave off a visual sort of warmth.  I could bring food, coffee, a book, my journal -- whatever I wanted. I could bring whomever I truly was.

And now? Living by myself in my own home, if I want to sit inside in my sweat pants and write on a Friday or Saturday night, I don't have anyone I have to get away from to do that.

Or, if I want, I can do what I did late yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a Friday:  I set out for the Brooklyn Bridge, moving toward Manhattan, toward the sunset, watching the sky turn pink and then a thick, milky, dark blue against the outlines of the buildings as they lit up. Around me, tourists and families and couples holding hands, and here I was on a Friday night, above the river, in the chill of the air, alone -- and was no one's business; they have their own lives.

And when I returned home, all was quiet, and the epsom salts dissolved in the steaming hot bath, and everything was right.

It took terrible things happening for my upstairs tenants to move out, to take with them their stomping up and down the stairs and coordinating Friday night bar trips loudly in the halls, on their cell phones, but I don't regret any of it now.  Because it got me here, back to my life.  It's not all said and done yet, not official yet, but there's a plan on the horizon that could make it affordable for me to stay here by myself after all.

Last week I was on the phone with a woman from the bank who'd called to respond to my complaint about my loan modification denial.  She was friendly and warm, good at her job.  Back in my hometown, she owned not one but two houses.  Her home, it turns out, was built the same year of the Victorian era that mine was.  She admired photos from my appraisal, complimenting me on the paint job I'd done on the front door.  Further conversation revealed that her home in the old historic district was officially classified as a mansion.  It was clear that she lived alone.

What on earth does anyone do with all of that space? All of those things?

I don't need all of these walls or rooms, it is true.  I don't ever want to own enough to fill them.

Except for with stillness, with my thoughts.  Here, my imagination has the space it needs to stretch outward, up, through the beautifully carved -- if weathered -- old Victorian banister.  Reaching upward through the space around which banister curves around again at each landing, until reaching the top of the house, limited only by the clear boundary of skylight glass that lets the moon begin to show its face to me again through that opening at the top of where I live.