Your “other half” leaves for the weekend. You are literally half of a human, like an amputee but worse because what’s missing is fifty percent of your entire soul. You are alone like a prisoner in the spacious two-bedroom brownstone that you can afford at thirty-one because you’re living on two incomes like a Wall Street banker with an online poker habit or a reality TV star with a lipstick line.
The deadbolt echoes as you lock all the locks then unlock and lock them again just to make sure they’re locked right because now that you’re alone you might as well have a “Welcome Criminals” sign hanging from your door. But don’t worry. The following guide will help you survive your own lonely thoughts.
- Remember the pronoun you were taught back when people were taught things like pronouns; it was pronounced “eye” but spelled with one letter. Use this instead of “we” to describe the places you go, the food you eat, the things you do and like and see and dislike and think and want and feel. It’s okay if you mess up at first. Keep trying.
- Find something you enjoy doing, anything. Your attention span will be the size of an organic pomegranate seed and there will be no one to tell you that it’s interesting, or that you’re good at it, or that it matters at all on any level, but do it as quickly and often as you possibly can like it’s the answer to hunger. This is called a “hobby.”
- Join Twitter.
- Follow all the people and only the people who like your new “hobby” and say exactly what you think if you were just clever enough to think it.
- When you crawl into your king-size bed that made you feel like a literal king for the last two years but now suddenly feels like an empty dungeon, quickly spread your body all over the sheets as far as it can possibly reach and imagine you are a child making snow angels in the big white lawn of your imagination. Don’t stop making snow angels…
- …Until you fall asleep. Then sleep like a mummy and your entire two-bedroom mansion is your enormous tomb and no one will ever find you because the map was destroyed lifetimes ago. You are Cleopatra. You are King Tut. You are the world’s biggest snow angel.
- Wake up.
- DON’T GET UP.
- Check Twitter.
- ………………………..
- Get out of bed before you feel like a breathing dumpster who does nothing but reads people on Twitter saying useless things and then reads the same useless things said a little differently by different people but also maybe the same people, it’s hard to tell, it’s all a blur of kind of funny jokes about real facts or real facts that sound like kind of funny jokes you don’t know which what’s going on nothing is real.
- Time for a quiz: If a person walks through the forest and no one is there to walk with them are they even really walking?
- A: They are; they are still walking. And they are a person and in a forest.
- Write that five thousand times.
- No, don’t type it and copy and paste it.
- Paper and a pen.
- Now, five thousand times.
- Go for a walk.
- Scroll through apps until you see something called “Contacts.” Pick someone – it can be totally random! And ask them to go get a drink; it can be coffee! Or a Long Island Iced Tea! Use an emoji.
- Finish your fourth Long Island Iced Tea and wonder if your Contact is right, maybe there really is no point and why the hell are you commuting fifty minutes each way to Flatiron every day just to write dumb ad copy for a dumb brand making dumb products when people around the world are dying and fighting or living on the beach?
- Remind yourself to hang out with your Contact again because clearly they are a genius.
- Stop at that bright dirty place called “Deli” on your corner because the Whole Foods Market closes at ten (???) and marvel at everything you see like Charlie in his chocolate factory, your entrance secured with your golden Amex. Just kidding, put that away. Pay the ATM fee – $4 to access candy-coated-heaven isn’t that bad.
- Eat for hours.
- Hear keys unlock each lock one by one and try not panic – oops, too late – as every part of your body freezes with dread like the zombie apocalypse has finally come to take you.
- Smile wide as your partner jumps into your personal space and throws their dirty airport arms around you.
