I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(48)

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To let the cat know I was still around, I took a stroll through this home that wasn’t mine. There was a portrait of a young woman I’d never met, her dark hair falling over the lace neckline of a white dress. There was that woman’s bedroom. The sunroom. A little wooden deck. A row of plants I was expected to hose down periodically so their leaves wouldn’t scorch in the July sun.

I stood on the deck and pulled up a map on my phone to get a better feel for where I was in relation to the rest of the city. I visually connected the dots between the house and the grocery store, the lake with a hiking trail, the few other places I knew to look for here in Nashville, the town in which I had been born but where I had not lived since I was a toddler, a place 250 miles from the city where my house, my spouse, my children, my obligations and responsibilities, were rooted.



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It felt like fate that I’d ended up here. A few weeks after the conversation about how to live von Furstenberg style, I had come up with another idea—a version of “away” that made a bit more sense. I floated the idea past John over dinner one night: “What if I went somewhere by myself, just temporarily, while the kids are at camp this summer? Somewhere I could, I don’t know, rest my brain.” That, we could figure out.

It was only days later that I heard from one of my best friends, who lives in Nashville. She told me about her friend, who was in a tough spot. Her friend, like me, needed some time away. She’d been through a divorce, the deaths of both her parents, and a hell year at work. Her boss was insisting she take advantage of her backlogged vacation time, and she’d found a place to stay at the beach for a few weeks, but she couldn’t take the cat, and she didn’t have the funds to afford a house sitter or boarding fees.

That’s how I ended up with a free place to stay and a job feeding a cat named Winston.

In the journal I kept during those weeks, Winston makes frequent appearances.

DAY 3: Winston walked into kitchen when I started the can opener. Ate his food and ran back out.

DAY 4: Who came up with the concept of a litter box? Why did other people adopt it? Why didn’t everyone look at that person and say, “That’s a terrible idea, Mike”?

DAY 6: I am on the sofa and Winston is on the floor and he’s staring at me. I just thought, My cat is trying to tell me something, and at first I freaked out because I didn’t know how I’d figure out what he’s trying to say. But this is not my cat! I don’t need to learn his language. We can exist here for a little while without understanding each other. Everything in his house will go back to normal soon. This is just a pause. I just said “pause” out loud to the cat. What if he thinks I said “paws”?

Other prevalent themes in my journal included my daily physical activity (“Hiked around Radnor Lake for 30 minutes”) and errands (“Found my way to Walgreens and got paper towels”). I was very good at recording my comings and goings, which were few.

I wasn’t entirely alone during my alone time. My old friend lived nearby in the same part of Nashville, and she came over a couple of times a week for coffee. I was acquainted with a few of her book club buddies, who welcomed me as well. I enjoyed the occasional lunch or dinner with these people, but mostly I went on walks by myself or stayed in the little house, with the invisible cat, moving from chair to sofa to deck steps to chair. I did enough editing work to keep my clients satisfied, sending someone a document or two every few days; but as usual for the summer, the workload was light. I didn’t need to check email very often.

It was a vacation of sorts from my regular life. But one of the reasons I kept to myself so much was that I didn’t want it to feel too much like a vacation. I wasn’t there to have a good time and paint the town. I was there to experience aloneness, to see if getting what I needed would make me feel better. Sometimes a change of scenery had helped me see myself as a new character; sometimes it hadn’t. I didn’t know whether this time would work, whether fresh surroundings would help me reset my mental health.

I talked to John once a day by phone. “What are you thinking about?” he’d ask.

“Nothing,” I’d say. I wasn’t deflecting. It wasn’t like when you ask your child what they did at school and they say “Nothing,” even though they did a lot of somethings. I was truly focused on having as little as possible to think about. I was tired of thinking. I wanted to purge the running commentary inside my own head: You are broken. Something is wrong with you. You can’t succeed at the life you are living. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

Later, I would realize that I had been doing a lot of meditating, although I didn’t fully understand what meditating was at the time and wouldn’t have called it that. I just knew that whenever a thought entered my head, I ushered it back out, protecting the emptiness. I craved nothingness—no agenda, no chatter. Just blessed silence.

I used to make fun of women who ran off to yoga retreats to find themselves. Not being a yoga person myself, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why stretching was somehow a transformative experience. (I’m sorry, I know there is so much more to yoga than stretching, but that’s what it looks like to me.) I once joked to a friend that Lululemon should come out with a line of midlife-crisis pants and finding-yourself bras. They’d sell like crazy.