how to sleep alone

+ letting object-driven identities go (unresolved)

I have my red cowboy boots back. I won’t say at last because I barely missed them, but they’re in the New Yorker tote bag that’s balanced on my shoulder as I walk home. It’s a great way to hold the hands of casual observers as they get to their conclusions about me. I don’t actually have a New Yorker subscription because I can’t afford it, but I see the headlines, and that kind of news resonates with me for sure. I have seen Letters to Juliet, in which the main character, played by Amanda Seyfried, works for the New Yorker. I got the gist. My friends and I watched it on holiday as one of our herd prepared bruschetta and spaghetti and ragu and wine. I remember the balsamic vinegar on the fresh tomatoes, and I remember resolving to eat spaghetti more, which I have not done in the year that’s passed. Instead, the bag on my shoulder also holds almond milk and tofu and broccoli, none of which is spaghetti, but it’ll do.

Anyway, I have my red starry cowboy boots back so now I’m a person who has red starry cowboy boots again. For a while I occupied a limbo, having loaned them out to a friend who spotted them on me at a house party I hosted. I would’ve taken them off my feet there and then, but instead I met her for drinks and handed off the cargo a few weeks later. I simultaneously had them and didn’t have them for a time. That was six months ago, and we’ve just managed to return me to my natural state of Red Cowboy Boot Owner. We met in a pub on a weekday and fought for a corner seat. We discuss dating shows and work and what actually constitutes a queer woman and whether we fit the bill. I find myself wanting to know what she thinks about everything, but I have to be careful not to let my intestines spill out into her pint. Instead I twist the things she offers up around my fork, watching them spin around stainless steel before chewing, forcing myself to take them in slowly.

Standing next to someone in the mirror is either the worst or best experience you can have, in my experience, and I’m all for high-risk-high-reward these days. By this I mean that you either chat and laugh and feel as though you’re back in your teens and getting ready for the social event of the season, or find a way to scrutinise yourself and feel as though you’re in a tunnel that’s closing up. Recently I’ve noticed how men love to tell me I have pretty privilege, which means I get told I’m pretty more with contempt than I do with love, and also means that reflective surfaces feel extra sharp. Not allowed to feel bad, because Man In Pub #4 told me I’m lucky, but not exactly feeling good, either. Tonight is fine, though. I enjoy watching our parallel but different processes. My friend ties her short hair out of her face and looks effortlessly graceful, whereas I enhance the chaos mine has already become on the train journey, ruffling it until it’s bigger and messier. I smudge pencil eyeliner around my eyes where she lays on felt with precision, cutting edge. It’s a lot of eyeliner for two people who know they’re going to cry at this gig. I grab a handful of sweets for the road.

The thing about these boots is I can slip a hip flask down the side of one and it’ll go unnoticed in a bar, where I can order a lime soda and top it up with my own vodka. This is not very put-together of me, nor is it very supporting-local-businesses of me. However it is very girl-about-town of me, and that’s the most affordable option at present. Ideally I’ll use my silver hip flask, which I believe is lucky, rather than the gold one, which, despite clearly matching the boots better, is cursed. I’m a pattern recogniser more than a superstitious person. Although I did just step into oncoming traffic to avoid walking under a ladder.

I take my recovered RCB (Red Cowboy Boots) onto the tube, setting the bag down on the floor, skirting spilled iced coffee and freshly spat chewing gum. I let my eyes rest on my reflection in the window opposite, an activity for which I’ve specifically chosen this seat, as the outside turns black. Instead of thinking about the thirty or more metres of concrete and wire and bustle pressing down on me from the city above, I fix my appearance. People keep telling me my fringe looks good, which is concerning because I know for a fact that my hair desperately needs to be washed, and if they’re complimenting my fringe, they’re definitely looking close enough to see the faults. Plus, even in the darkness, in the blurry reflection, I can tell that the bags under my eyes are severe. I don’t know how I’ve managed that- it’s only Tuesday. If I think about it, maybe I do know how I’ve managed that, but the weekend of cocktails and being too hot to sleep, tossing and turning and dreaming feels so far away. I had a dream that I killed a man with my bare hands and stepped back to look at what I’d done in shock. I shouted for my friend to help me and asked her what I should do, and she said ‘you’re on your own,’ and retreated back into the shadows. I was glad to wake up from it, the dream, the panic of which I can still feel if I tune into it.

‘What would you have actually done?’ I ask the friend who had featured. ‘Would you turn me in?’

‘Probably not. I’d see what you wanted to do about it. I’ve got your back’ I’m touched and disturbed.

I wake up from a nap as the sun goes down, limbs askew in the tiny train seat. My friend is dozing next to me, and I cuddle into her until my neck hurts and we’re approaching the station. I brush sugar from the sweets we’ve been sharing off of my jeans. When we get to the house that holds the spare room we’re crashing in, we’re immediately enamoured with our host. Blue dye is washing out of her hair, she has Agatha Christie shelved next to printed fanfiction and TV show memorabilia. My friend and I stroke a glassy-eyed dog while our host makes us coffee at 7pm. There’s a cardboard cut out of a celebrity we can’t identify beside a grand piano in the living room, and I’m convinced none of the pictures- some of which look a hundred years old or more- are of people she knows. I instantly want to let my guard completely down, take off my makeup, slouch off the character, let her know that any hint of nonchalance is constructed. I can be real too. 

The force of the train through its tunnel pounds on the doors. Sometimes on public transport I forget to breathe, and I worry that the sharp intake of breath I take when I realise I’m not underwater disturbs the people around me. I see that a woman in the next carriage also has a New Yorker tote bag. Oh god, she’s getting off at this stop too. Now it’s a competition. It’s fine because I’m ahead of her, so I’ll reach the exit first but shit she’s overtaking me. So now I’m the copycat. Her bag is faded where mine isn’t, which denotes that she’s been a fan of the New Yorker for longer, or maybe more vigorously, somehow. I used to be all sorts of things. I used to be a morning person. And now I’m not even the most New Yorker tote bag owning person on this train. You know what else? It’s not even my bag. I’ve been learning how arbitrary the things we tie ourselves to are- and even if they’re not, we don’t get much of a say. Huge shifts in what I thought of myself as, tectonic and shaking, go unnoticed. 

When I get to surface level, there’s a woman on the street wearing a long white dress, with a suede jacket to make sure you know she’s still cool. She floats into the supermarket ahead of me with her dress skirting her heels, headphones over her hair. I want to be her, I want to be best friends, I want to giggle with her in the fruit aisle. We cross paths inside and as I get close I see mud staining the bottom of the skirt, the kind that’s splashed up from a puddle. I’m in love with her a little, as though that means anything. I want to be her. As I walk home, I make lingering eye contact with a man who walks past. I realise only afterwards that it will have seemed coquettish on my part; I just wondered if the cigarette in his mouth was his last or if he had another I could take. I always know something’s wrong when I’m looking to busy my hands.

I used to be someone who had to have a bed to myself. I’d leave parties so I didn’t have to squeeze onto a sofa bed with a friend, opting instead to have my own space. I’d give any excuse to be able to stretch out across a mattress without kicking someone awake, on long mornings when time would wrap itself around me. But somewhere along the way I started to hate sleeping alone. Last summer, in the old flat, if I found myself going that way, I’d have a friend over, stay with someone, anything to keep me from lying awake. Some nights I couldn’t avoid it. Sirens and passing cars making shadows of the lace curtains onto the wall and my thoughts and my mistakes and my decisions tangled in them. I’d sit on the narrow window ledge with my legs dangling down, two stories crumbling beneath me; I’d watch a handful of stars push their light through the pollution with the morning on their tail, forcing myself to stay up until I was too tired to know that I was the only body in the bed. 

I’ve found a balance.

But I still find myself caught up in the objects I keep around me, the shiny things I pull into my nest, that make it easier to stomach the expanse of mattress, that make it appealing to anyone who could fill a space. Magpies are just homemakers, really. They don’t deserve such a harsh reputation.

There’s something about the city in the heat that feels lawless, so I strip down to black cotton underwear, push the straps of my bra off my shoulder, climb out of the window onto the roof that stretches out below. Visible only to parallel flats and double decker buses with a keen eye. Block out the sun with a book held over my face. An empty bed is comfortable like a fresh hot grave, but in the sun you can really stretch out without anything seeming too final. I’m reading a book I feel as though I’ve read a million times before, because, like so many others, it’s more of a list of concepts than it is a comment on anything. It’ll do.

Writing something that people read to see in their mind’s eye rather than take anything away from seems to be the way to go now. If you can crack the formula- usually a combination of seemingly innocuous objects, religious references, anecdotes tied up with neat bows that connect them to nothing, and a couple of words that you learned just yesterday- just right, you can create something incredibly readable. Pleasing. I wouldn’t hold that against anyone, because it’s a pattern I weave myself, too- it’s what I’m doing right now, in a way. Listening concepts. Is there anything wrong with keeping yourself in the zeitgeist sprint if you know exactly what will get you to the front of the pack? At least it keeps your hands busy. Just know the thrill won’t last long, and you can’t subsist on it. It’s like a flirtation, it’s a hit, it’s a jolt, it’s a flash. Don’t expect it to carry you from one place to the next; take it for what it is. You’re dynamic and life-bound, you need substance.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to be undefinable by the objects I surround myself with. think it’s time I admit that the reason I don’t like the woman who creates personal narratives by showing everyone the most sellable, nameable parts of herself is because I’m afraid I’m like her, or I’m embarrassed that I could be. We’re all seven layers deep in pointing pick-me fingers and it’s not useful, so I try to drop the framework. Sometimes I do feel more at home in my own skin if I over-characterise myself. It’s not the end of the world. I also don’t think I have to feel bad for being jarred when others do the same, boiling themselves down to a few items on display. It can all be true at once, the paradigms are holding hands. The truth is just a name for whatever resonates the most in a given moment.

When discourse seems ever-increasingly deontological, of course identifying with your outward identity is something we cling to. We’re all weighing up one another’s virtuousness, so you have to find a way to give them an easy conclusion. I get it. Cling to the idea of the person you want to be, tie bonds, establish that powdery sisterhood through the acquisition of Things. Everything’s fine in moderation, even losing yourself in a sea of belongings.

I love these boots because they can speak for themselves when I’m sick of the sound of my own voice. A man called out to me once from a park bench to tell me he liked them.

‘If anyone ever tries to mess with you, you can kick him in the shins,’ he said. I barely even had to reply for it to be a passable conversation.

You can’t rely on objects to speak for you all the time, though. It lets people decide who they think you are on your behalf, and that’s not as fun as it sounds. In the pub, two male friends agree that their ‘ideal type’ truly is the manic pixie dream girl.

‘You’re joking,’ I scold. They rattle off examples that don’t do much to close my mouth, that hangs agape. ‘Why?’

I’m so scared to be two-dimensional that I adhere myself to anything that might throw a category off-course, and then I have the nerve to be surprised when all I am is the sum of my parts. But tuning into where else the lifeforce could sit seems like more effort than it’s worth. What do we talk about when we talk about the self? What is it we’re feeling when we sense the weight of a body in the bed beside us? How do we preserve the shape they leave behind without it becoming just a shape?

Tonight, already too late to make something of myself, I sit half-beside, half-atop the pile of laundry on the sofa that needs putting away. I’m delighted that the grey cat who sometimes sneaks into our flat through the window chooses tonight to visit. The first time we met him was a few days after I saw a mysterious pawprint on my pillow, that I decided to ignore, and he’s been coming back ever since.  He doesn’t have a collar, so we’re not sure what his story is. We try our best not to scare him away when he’s here, but he has no problem making us jump, unexpected shadow in the kitchen. He meows loudly in the living room, wanting something. I want to find it for him.

I have to confess something. I’m a little uneasy around cats. I’ve always wanted to be okay with a creature that could love me in a way that’s not dependent, but it doesn’t really work out. And they’re all claws and hissing and sharp joints, and slinking when you try to pick them up, which I’m always too afraid to do. Which is why this one gets the better of me. I give him some of the treats we bought to win his affection, I pull a bowl of water close to him, I scratch his head as much as he’ll allow before lightly yeowling at me (which is for all of two seconds). Then I hold open the door to my bedroom so that he’ll leave. He does not want to. He wants to jump onto the pile of fresh laundry and stretch so that it falls off the sofa. Then he wants to curl up and go to sleep. 

I usher him gingerly, then loudly, but he’s immune to my voice.

‘It’s one in the morning,’ I implore him, but he doesn’t seem to care.

The problem is this: if I go to bed and he decides to stay, he could, theoretically, tear apart our living room. Or do something otherwise untoward. He has a slight wildness in his untrusting eyes, I’m convinced. So I need to keep him in my sights. But, if I go to bed and he decides to leave, he’ll have to leave via my windowsill, which he’ll access via jumping onto my bed, where I will be sleeping- specifically, most likely, my face. Plus, I can’t sleep with the windows open (two years and I’m still not used to the sirens). And there’s something between us that tugs at the fate of those early morning hours: I don’t think he likes to sleep alone either. I make a tired executive decision, pulling a blanket over me on my corner of the sofa. I curl up beside him, and close my eyes. It takes me a while to drift off in the tight shape I’ve adopted to avoid nudging him with my feet, but his shape beside me is calming. When the room falls silent, I realise he’s purring in his sleep.