Alone on a Thursday

Fiction, about an adult over 18. What it is like to do this on your own, written without apology and without pretending it is the same thing.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

The brush lives in the bottom drawer, under a jumper I do not wear, in a flat in Sheffield where nobody else has a key and the mortgage is mine.

I bought it in a chemist in 2019 for four pounds fifty, along with cotton buds and a birthday card, because I had read somewhere that you should buy other things too and it took me until the car park to work out that the woman on the till did not care and had never cared and was thinking about her lunch.

Thursday because the flat above me is empty on Thursdays. That is the entire reason. There is no ritual meaning to it, although four years in there is now a kind of meaning, the way any repeated thing acquires one.

What actually happens is administrative for the first ten minutes, which is not what anybody writes about.

I put my phone in the kitchen. I put a towel down, because otherwise I spend the whole time thinking about the duvet cover. I write a number on the back of an envelope and leave it where I can see it.

The number is the important part and I will come back to it.

Here is the thing that nobody tells you about doing this by yourself, and it is not the loneliness, although we will get to the loneliness.

It is that you cannot be surprised.

There is no anticipation, because the hand knows what it is doing before it does it. There is no waiting, because I am the one making the wait happen and I can end it whenever I like. There is no possibility of the next one arriving sooner than expected or harder than expected or in a place I was not braced for, and it turns out that almost everything I want out of this lives in that gap between not knowing and finding out.

So it is not the same. I want that on the record early, because I have read accounts by women in my position that talk about it as though it were an equivalent and I do not think that is honest.

The number, then.

I write it down beforehand because I cannot be trusted afterwards. Not in the way you might think. I do not stop early. I have never once stopped early.

What I do, if there is no number on an envelope, is keep going, in a businesslike sort of way, past any point that has anything to do with what I came for. It gets faster and less careful and I stop noticing it properly, and then I am sitting on the edge of the bed at eleven o'clock feeling flat and slightly sick and wondering what that was.

The envelope exists for that reason and no other. Somebody has to be in charge of the ending, and if there is only one of you in the flat then the version of you at nine o'clock has to take responsibility for the version at twenty past.

It works, mostly. I count out loud, which sounds ridiculous and is, and which is the only way I have found to keep myself honest. My own voice in an empty room saying eleven. Then twelve.

What I get out of it is real, and underselling it to make a point would be a lie.

There is a settling. Somewhere around two thirds of the way through the number on the envelope, the noise in my head drops by a level, the way a fan drops when the room reaches temperature. My shoulders come down. I stop drafting.

Afterwards I sleep like a stone, and I am better on a Friday, and there is a stretch of about an hour where I feel quiet and physically pleased with myself in a way that has nothing to do with anybody looking at me.

That is not nothing. Four years of that is not nothing.

And then there is the tea.

I make it myself, obviously. Kettle, two minutes, the good mug. And it is fine, and I sit on the sofa with the heating on and the telly going next door through the wall, and it is completely fine.

What is missing is not romance. I want to be exact here because it would be easy to write a paragraph about wishing there were somebody to hold me and it would be true and it would also be the smaller half of it.

What is missing is somebody to say that is enough now.

Not to stop me. I stop fine, I have an envelope. To take it off me. To be the one who decides that the thing is finished, so that finishing is something that happens to me rather than another item on a list I am administering.

With another person there is an ending, and the ending is a gift, and it arrives from outside. On a Thursday in my own flat the ending is just me, putting a brush back in a drawer, under a jumper I do not wear.

People are strange about this when I have told them, which is twice.

Both times the response had pity in it, and both times I found the pity harder to take than the thing itself. As though a woman of forty-two doing something for herself on a Thursday were a small tragedy, rather than a woman of forty-two solving a problem with the materials available.

I am not sad about it. I am occasionally sad about other things, in the ordinary way, and some Thursdays those things are closer to the surface than others. But the brush in the drawer is not evidence of a failed life. It is evidence of a person who knows what she needs and has not yet found the circumstances to have it properly, and who has decided, in the meantime, not to go without entirely.

The honest question, which I ask myself about twice a year, usually in February.

Is making do the same as being alone.

I think the answer is no, and I think the answer is no in a way that matters. Making do is an active thing. It has an envelope and a towel and a count and a put-away afterwards, and every part of that is somebody looking after herself on purpose rather than going without and calling it fine.

I would like it to be somebody else one day. I would like the ending to be a gift. I have been on two websites and to one social evening in a pub function room and I have not given up on it, exactly, I have just stopped organising my life around whether it happens.

In the meantime it is Thursday, and the flat above is empty, and there is an envelope on the chest of drawers with a number on it in my own handwriting.

It is not nothing. I would like it to be more than not nothing. Both of those have been true for four years and neither one has cancelled out the other.