For the first time in quite a while I find myself alone on a regular basis. I wake up alone, which is terrible (although Bjorn always leaves the coffee pot half full for me, a nice touch). I have a hard time getting out of bed when I don’t have the added incentive of a sleeping person to pester into consciousness and/or the hope that that person will make me eggs while I fix my hair.

It occurs to me that what others might consider codependent I have considered natural for much of the duration of this relationship. Like showering together every morning. Thank god we had a really permissive roommate.

Now I just get up and try to move as little as humanly possible before I walk out the door. I walk to work without distractions, because I don’t like listening to music in public spaces. Sometimes, however, I call my mom to hear a human voice, a warm-up for my workday. You’d think your mind would get used to other voices, to these infringements on your own consciousness, but it’s still sort of jarring every morning when I have to interact with someone. Actually, what’s jarring is hearing my own voice come out of my mouth. I’m never prepared for it. I spend a lot of time in my own head.

Bjorn thinks I’m not a morning person because I love to sleep. That’s not entirely true. I just hate that moment where I become part of the world again.

Yesterday I had to buy a hat, which is the kind of nonsense objective I enjoy. (The more unnecessary the task, the more likely I am to complete it.) Bjorn had a $50 gift card for a nice hat shop that was about to expire, so I took it upon myself to procure a sun hat.

After work I took the T to the Common and walked to Newbury Street, where this fancy hat shop is located. The first thing I noticed upon entering was that all the employees were white and all the customers were black. This is not a configuration one sees every day in Boston. This only confirmed my fear that I’m not meant to be a hat person, but I soldiered on.

Normally, when a retail salesperson asks if I need help or if I’m looking for anything specific, I say no, even if that’s a blatant lie. But being alone makes me forget how much I hate interacting with strangers, so I asked a nice young employee if he had any floppy sun hats.

“Well, if you’re looking at our bottom-end stuff, they’re basically all the same in terms of price and construction. They’re just different colors at this point,” he said. Another employee hovered. “What do we call this line?” the first employee asked. Flagship. “That sounds a lot better than bottom-end,” I said. He didn’t think that was funny.

It turns out I have a pretty small head, and they were all out of extra-smalls. “That one might be a little big for you,” the employee said. “But it looks really good on you.” These small flatteries are the solace we offer women shopping alone, women whom we believe are alone.

Let me tell you, it works. I felt so good about this awesome new hat (which the store manager taught me how to fold up, “like a burrito,” for safe travels) that I went straight into the H&M up the block to try on cheap gauzy shirts that I then justified purchasing by telling myself they would make great beach cover ups, even though I spend probably 1 to 2 days a year in a bathing suit. I looked at myself essentially naked—bra and underwear standing in for a bathing suit—in a full-length mirror for the first time in a while.

How sad, I thought, that I have to wear pants every day. Someone other than my husband should be appreciating my ass while I still have it. I suspect this need for constant external validation is the reason my generation is totally fucked, but in that H&M dressing room I didn’t bother to scold myself for wanting it. Seriously, I thought, I have to see these college girls who already have cellulite on their upper thighs walking around Harvard Square at all hours of the day in cervix-baring short-shorts and meanwhile I’m quite literally sitting on this precious asset while its value diminishes.

A silly train of thought, for sure. A few months ago I said something offhand to one of my male friends about the ritual of taking my pants off after work on Fridays. He responded with a very specific comment about my ass, the kind of thing that made me realize that not only was he thinking about my ass in a very nonabstract way but that maybe it was not the first time. It was extremely uncomfortable. It’s sort of thrilling but mostly depressing to realize that someone could be objectifying you at any given moment. I think that’s one of the benefits of not being alone: pretending this gulf between you and everyone else doesn’t exist, that your ass is just your ass—the validation, conferred by this other individual you share your life with, that you are exactly as you perceive yourself to be. No human sounding boards to bounce identities off of, no selves to try and discard like flimsy H&M blouses. Just an endless feedback loop, and a very comfortable certainty.

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   Summer Staycation: On

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