A Mouth To Feed: Living Alone in 2020

Sunset sky from the driveway of my apartment in August.

Starting off a blog feels a little bit like walking into a Lowe’s and when the man with a very nice thick mustache asks “what’re you working on” and I just grin ear-to-ear and reply, “A plank.” Welcome. Let’s drown together.

At the beginning of this year, I was living with a married couple. My friend Bri and her husband Derek. I moved in with them in June 2019, when I first moved to Portland. I left my marriage in October 2018, with little to no resistance from my husband Tony. I liked living with a couple. I missed my own domesticity, and so at times, it felt like I was gently tip-toeing in their sphere, the three of us often piled onto a soft lumpy couch for TV nights. They were great roommates, even when I was picking up their socks from the living room floor and leaving them on the staircase to their room upstairs. I might have whined about it, but I think I loved the subtle chaos of an endless supply of mismatched socks. Derek and I would often take turns cooking dinner, a couple of Tauruses, the most satisfying of a competition. We ate good, my first nine months here in Portland. 

On January 11th, I was sitting on the couch. Starting to throw together poems for a chapbook, my first book of poems since the summer of 2017. I got a phone call from my friend in Spokane, Deece. Tony’s best friend. I answered and I immediately knew. Tony was gone.

In March, I packed up my things at Bri and Derek’s house, and moved them into the basement storage of my friend Sabrina’s apartment. She had a 10x10 storage that fit most of my shit, and an empty guest room I threw my mattress into. I left for my hometown Spokane on March 3rd, to spend the next few weeks remodeling Tony and I’s house, and hopefully find someone to rent the house to, so I could scuttle back to Portland and carry on with my plans for 2020. 

I picked up shifts bartending at my old job, Hi Neighbor, hoping to offset the massive amount money I was dumping into this house. I swiped online, hoping to find someone to distract myself with. I was sleeping on an air mattress, in the unfurnished ‘office’ space upstairs. Cold, with the dark wood paneled walls and bushy dark brown carpet. I couldn’t stand up straight in the upstairs, save for the center of the room, but I’d knock my head a good dozen times on the slants of ceiling over the next six weeks. I matched someone and I invited them to stop by the bar while I worked. They came. They bought a beer. I bought their next. It was daylight savings. They were sweet and coy and quiet at the bar. I liked their smile. They helped me mop the bar after closing and I drove us to a late night diner where we picked up fries and then we returned to my dead husband’s house. We sat in the kitchen, bright overhead lights, and finally I fucked them on the air mattress. It was nice. They stuck around into the next day. Company was a reprieve. That sad, lonely, smoke-stained house. They were kind, until they weren’t. They were helpful, until they weren’t. And I liked having them around, until I didn’t. As my best friend would later put it, “They get to vacation in your grief.”

The kitchen wall of Tony and I’s house in March 2020. Smoke on the wall, partially scrubbed off. The smoke damage was from Tony heating the house the winter of 2018-2019 with the gas fireplace because the thermostat was broken, and the floo of the fire place was closed.

This is beside the point, but dating them, if that is what our accidental co-quarantine in my dead husband’s house was, did illuminate that I perhaps need to consider raising my standards. They couldn’t really cook. They ruined a paintbrush. They collaged bible passages on their acoustic guitar. I know. I know.

Once, we were fucking and they pulled out and came on my stomach. Nice. Then they bent down and licked it up. Huh. Cool hadn’t seen that before. I’m sure I looked impressed. Then they smirked and motioned for a kiss. I propped myself up and kissed them and then I swear to god they spit their cum into my mouth and I panicked. I shook my head, eyes wide. They opened their palm and I spat it back out. By this time, my stomach had lurched. And then, without flinching, they emptied it back into their own mouth and swallowed. Horrified, I described this a friend later as “I think I just got a blumpkin today.” I was rightfully, and gently, course corrected. “No, no. That’s a snowball. Technically, I think you had a snowball fight.” Gross.

With COVID rapidly escalating in March, my plans were changing. Friends that had offered to help with the taks house were now out of work, their kids home from school, and others were just being mindful and staying home. I had a few friends still manage to come scrub at the walls and paint the ceilings, each hour of their help, one more hour I didn’t have to be in that house alone.

Finally, in April, after thousands of dollars of catching up on bills and paint and a new kitchen floor, I headed back to Portland. I stayed for a few months with an acquaintance, a carpenter, and we started a garden, and I hiked with my dog in Forest Park, and I went to Sauvie Island, and I made lots of steak, and I started regularly attending recovery meetings online. And then one day, I decided that I’d really like to try living alone.

My estranged husband died from suicide in January. He died behind on house payments, thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and back-owed utilities. His parents paid for the funeral. There was a pleasant benefit show at the comedy club where he worked. My mom and I went to the veteran’s hospital and I filed for the spousal benefits. My husband had been on disability for the last six years, after the military deemed him unfit to work due to his depression and PTSD, both of which the military claimed culpability due to his service. When we were first married, his benefits were raised and he received roughly $2900 a month. I was not confused on how he’d gotten this far behind. Even when we were together, he wasn’t good with money, or really known for responsible spending. It was easy for me to fill in the blanks of what happened to his finances in the year between my leaving and his passing. 

In late February, I was approved for spousal benefits. A process they said get take months, took four weeks. The benefits are the only way I was able to afford leaving my life in Portland to go clean up and try to take care of our house. These benefits are the reason I’ve paid my rent every month and on time in the middle of a pandemic. I say all this, because my choice to live alone was a privilege, and a privilege weighed down by grief. I’ll receive these benefits until I remarry - hahaha - and for now am pleased as pie to be a small part of the redistributing money from the wildly fucked military system. 

One day, I hope that these benefits are something that I can rely on less, and instead I find myself in a position to donate money monthly. But, alas, I’m a writer who works ten hours a week at a burrito shop in pandemic, and am trying to sell videos of my asshole for $5.99 on OnlyFans, with the rest of the willing and horny and shameless. 

I have liked living alone, no, I have loved living alone. I like shitting with my bathroom door open. I like wandering naked from the shower to the fridge. I writhe on the living floor unabashedly listening to Chromatica, again. I make dinner and I eat seconds and I eat my leftovers the next day. I let dishes fill the sink and then I wash them all. Food goes bad in the fridge when I forget it. Mostly spinach or yogurt. There has never been a drop of alcohol in this apartment, no wine or beer or liquor. No weed smoke or bongs or vape pens. It’s been good for my sobriety. It’s a huge reason I sought solitude. The ability to climate control my home, for the first time ever. Even with Tony I was wary of what might be hiding in the recycling can in the alley. 

Here, alone, I talk on the phone and am not embarrassed about what is overheard. I spend entire days on my couch watching Avatar: The Last Airbender or this month it was True Blood. See, I have range. My dog barks when the neighbor’s across the landing are loud clamoring into their front door or when a package is dropped off by the sweet and haggard FedEx man with great sideburns. I trot my vibrator into every room of the apartment, but I rarely orgasm. I have only had sex in this apartment twice. What a waste of this solitude. But I am grateful for it. For the silence, for the whirring of my dishwasher, for playing my wedding song and watching myself cry in the mirror, for god damn Zoom meetings with friends I haven’t even hugged yet, for the occasional brief guests who ate my dinners with either real or Oscar-worthy enthusiasm. For my brief bubble, Jamie and John, and the last time I saw them together and we watched Cats. 

I rearrange my plants. I buy knick knacks. I buy art from people I really like on Instagram and from my friends. I get most of my shit off of Facebook Marketplace, the most I’ve used Facebook all year. And then finally one day, I realize, I don’t want to live alone anymore. I was on the phone with a friend, asking about their day, when I realized this.

When I left Tony, we had lived together from July 2016 until October 2018, all but three months of our relationship. He was clean and tidy and folded his underwear. We took turns making dinner, but he was always the one washing the dishes. We were drunk and we were sober and we were in love and we lived in a wonderful apartment with a view of the city, until the hole in the ceiling leaked for four months and we decided we should buy a house. His VA loan meant we could buy a house without a downpayment. I was used to someone always being there, so when I left him and spent the next nine months more or less driving cross country, desperate to make a bucket pass pay for a hotel or at least a gas can, I would spend most of the day gabbing on the phone. I’m a talker, y’all, anyone who loves me knows this. So I decided, I want someone in my apartment because I am tired of talking to ghosts. I don’t want to always have to pick up the phone. I just want to poke my head in the door frame, “Hey, how’s your day?” “Want to grab a pizza for dinner?” “There’s a new National album, want to come listen with me?” “Did you hear about Elliot Page?” “Look at this new leaf on my plant.” “Look! I taught Maya a new trick.” “Do these bike shorts make my ass look good?” “I”m having a shit day, want to watch this John Mulaney special with me?” 

I found a roommate. They move in next month. I’m excited for company again. I’m going to miss shitting with the door open. But I am ready for someone else with a mouth to feed. If you live alone, what do you love about it? If you live in community, with friends or roommates or a loved one, what do you love? Tell me all about it.