Really Good, Actually(47)

I walked home at a clip, my breath forming satisfying little clouds ahead of me. The sky was pink and the air was cold, and people were rushing around full of purpose. I felt proud of myself for accepting my limits: Christmas had been okay, but I didn’t want to spend tonight surrounded by happy couples and groups of people excitedly flirting in sparkly outfits all sharing sloppy midnight smooches. I didn’t want to have to tell anyone that my New Year’s resolutions were to cry less, figure out if I liked being outdoors, and experiment with breakfast salads. A night in was exactly what I needed.

I got home, unpacked my groceries, and changed into my most sophisticated/least dirty pajamas. I put my phone in a bowl with a plate on top of it, like I was trapping a spider. I boiled some water for tea (“a soothing blend of herbs for women”) and took out flour, salt, olive oil, and fast-acting yeast. I looked around for a measuring cup. The best I could do was a branded plastic wineglass from a music festival with 150 ml and 250 ml marked on the side.

I mixed my ingredients and rolled the resultant dough into a ball, channeling an aging celebrity baker I sometimes masturbated about. I kneaded my bread ball and left it under a dishcloth to rise. I went into the bathroom and lit my library candle. I filled the tub with Epsom salts, essential oils, and a few dusty petals from a drugstore bouquet that had been moldering in the corner of my bedroom for three weeks, why not. I put on a playlist called “Relaxing Piano” and ate a clementine, naked. I looked at my body in the mirror and thought, you know what, fine.

I lay in the tub for what felt like hours, semi-successfully clearing my mind. As my fingers started to prune, a timer went off in the kitchen, and I ran dripping through the apartment to check on my dough. It was much larger than I’d left it—a result. I put my new, larger dough ball on a baking sheet, covered that with a clean cloth, and left it alone again. I had some slightly basic thoughts about “being left alone to rise.”

After mopping up the wet patches I’d left around the kitchen, I went back to the bathroom and moisturized myself into oblivion. I was slicker than a baby seal, oilier than the bowl I’d put the bread in. I shone. I also couldn’t touch anything without leaving it streaked in residue. I wandered around the apartment, avoiding skin contact with any of my possessions and waiting—for my dough to proof, for my body to dry, for a sense of peace and personal empowerment to wash over me. The drying took longer than expected, and the empowerment, if it planned to arrive at all, was slow going too.

I ate a cookie and experienced some light FOMO. My friends were probably in a hot tub right now, dipping breadsticks into sour cream and laughing their heads off, creating amazing memories and inside jokes I’d never quite be part of. I wondered if maybe this entire thing had been a bad idea. I went to my bookshelf and opened some Pema Ch?dr?n, heavily dog-eared.

I had acquired the book last summer, while purchasing a bunch of novels about change, travel, the moon, and how badly famous figures in American literature treated their wives, at a local bookstore where I liked to flirt with the cranky old man behind the counter. When I brought my selections to the register, he said, “Bad breakup?” and threw in When Things Fall Apart for free. A few weeks later we went on a date where we both got incredibly drunk but only one of us talked about our experimental poetry collection for too long.

I flipped through my Ch?dr?n, taking in highlighted passages that had, I guess, been important to me a few months earlier: “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.” Sure. “When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something.” Maybe! “So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t even sit for one, that’s the journey of the warrior.” I did not feel like a warrior, but I did move the bowl with my phone in it to the bathroom.

Looking for direction, and with time to kill while the oven warmed up, I kept reading until I found this: “Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end . . . that is the basic message.”

I was attempting to relax with death when Merris came downstairs. Despite her move-in day promise about keeping to herself, Merris visited my apartment fairly regularly, to drop off leftovers, or ask who Chet Haze was, or complain about a recent interaction with a student (“Honestly, and I hope you won’t find this offensive, I’m just not certain we need to queer everything”). This time, she was bringing twelve grapes.

“To eat at midnight,” she said. “You have one at each stroke of the clock. They do it in Spain, for luck.” I asked her if she had Spanish heritage. She did not, but had spent several New Year’s Eves there and kept up the tradition on her own.

I told her I welcomed anything that might make this year better than the last.

“Oh, you’re not having such a bad time,” Merris said. “I’ve heard you down here giggling with that curly-haired fellow, Sinjin or whoever.”

“Simon.”

“Simon, sure, that’s what I said. How’s it going?”

“Oh, too fast,” I said. “Heading for disaster, almost certainly.”

Merris looked surprised. “And what makes you think that?”