Fall weather always hits me in the gut with the bittersweet feels. It’s a time of nesting and settling in and maybe cutting back, but also one that feels full of potential and dusty roads yet to be traveled. It seems to be the time of year when the ghosts from the past dance closest to memory’s edges. I’m not sure that there isn’t a link between spooky season and this idea that memories seem to be stirred more easily in the fall. For me, it’s often been a season of transition. I’ve made most of my geographical moves in the fall: to Memphis, to State College, to San Francisco. Most of my biggest relationships seemed to hit their stride in fall (maybe because all of them started in the summer). Though I can’t remember all of the circumstances – I suspect most of those relationships also had their first breakups and reconciliations in the fall – there seems to be something about the 3-4 month mark that tests a lot of relationships.
When I started writing this a few days ago, it wasn’t about fall. When I started writing this, it was about a Twitter prompt and living alone, and how many or how few people have done that for any significant period of time. Then I hung out with various friends – some who have almost always lived alone, and some who have had various relationships. Then I had a dream about an ex and the shore and my new dog (I don’t have a new dog, but in the dream I did). All the while, I’ve been taking evening walks and the weather has changed and I’ve been reminded of previous fall seasons. Then came the bittersweet. Then came the minor discontents mixed with fond memories that fall sometimes brings. I want long walks in the newly darkened night. I want warm apple cider. I want to meet up at the corner bar before dinner. I want the crisp air in my lungs. I want the smell of wood burning in a fire pit. I want red wine on the deck or porch or stoop. I want the stars shining a little more clearly when the air and clouds are thin.
The question on Twitter was, “Have you ever experienced living alone? No kids, no roommates, just you?” The response from someone I follow on Twitter was something along the lines of, “six months, I was lonely and unsure and sad…”
As someone who has lived alone for the better part of the last eight years, I had one of those moments where I was almost surprised to learn that there are adults out there who have never lived alone. I had to remind myself that up until eight years ago, I was one of those adults. It’s a concept (living together/sharing space) that seems almost foreign to me now.
Sitting in the mostly dark apartment as the sky began to brighten and the sliver of a crescent moon rose and faded, I was trying to tie a few things together: living alone, dating at age 50, the last time I lived with someone, the upheavals of moving, the timelines of long-term relationships. For me, living with other people (aside from college roommates) has usually been the result of a pretty serious relationship or the necessity of living with family. I’ve lived with parents – though not since my first year out of college. I’ve lived with my nuclear family (wife and step-daughter). I lived with my girlfriend in college. I lived (briefly) with a girlfriend/fiancée. And now, I, along with most of the single people I meet/know, live alone.
The last time I lived with someone (two someones) was in 2018/2019. I had been living alone for a little over 2 years when my daughter moved back in with me in October, 2018. The second someone, the girlfriend/fiancée, moved in at the end of March, 2019.
I’m not sure when we started doing this, probably in the fall of 2018, but the girlfriend and I began splitting our time between two houses, hers in the city (Philadelphia) and mine in the suburbs (Yardley). I know we had been talking about living together because she mentioned that my daughter moving in might be an unanticipated wrinkle to us moving in together (though I think this was also when she first mentioned marriage). Nevertheless, at some point, we established this pattern of spending our weeknights in the city and weekends in the suburbs. I’m also not sure why we settled on that arrangement – probably because she had a dog and as such her schedule was less flexible and her travel more cumbersome. Probably because it was a reverse commute for me and I had the more flexible work schedule.
I’m never sure if those few months of living in two houses count as living together. We didn’t really spend our mornings together – I was usually up and out the door by 5:30am so that I could get back to my place, exercise, feed my cats, and go to work. We hadn’t combined our stuff – she had her place with her stuff and I had my place with my stuff. But the fact that we were together every day (or almost every day) made it seem like we were living together. Six months into the relationship we got engaged, and three or four months after that she found a renter for her place in the city, quit her job, and moved into my place in the burbs. A week and a half after moving in, she left and moved out. I suppose it was a good thing she hadn’t gone through with issuing a lease to the renters. My daughter stayed until June or July of 2019 when I put the house up for sale.
For the girlfriend, getting engaged was a precondition of moving in together. I think she had had a bad experience in Seattle – moved in with a guy, things ended, felt stuck. Or something like that. And maybe a bad experience with a guy in L.A. She was never clear on the details. I had wanted to marry her anyway, so the precondition didn’t matter much to me. I also hadn’t lived with very many other people – so moving in together, for me, was as serious a commitment as getting engaged. I’ve since had people tell me that getting engaged after six months was fast or moving in was fast. I don’t know. None of it felt rushed on my end. But this is where some perspective comes in. We had each been living alone and single for a few years before we met. But I think our histories of living alone or having partners was considerably different – we were probably coming at it from very different places. She had lived with a few different people (I think), and I had not. She had been in a few different long-term relationships when she was younger and I had not. I had dated a lot after my marriage – she had not. Moving in together was probably a bigger deal for me than it was for her. She later described the experience, somewhat dismissively, as playing house. I didn’t see it that way.
That was five years ago – almost six. Since then, I haven’t dated anyone seriously enough to think about moving in together. Most of the people I’ve met, like that ex, seem to have had significantly different experiences than I’ve had – meaning they’ve lived with more people and have had more long-term relationships than I’ve had – especially the ones who have never been married. They’ll have had a five year relationship and then a two year and then three year – or something like that. In terms of who I’ve cohabitated with, those relationships lasted (not necessarily the cohabitation piece) 7 years then 17 years then less than a year. The people I meet – a lot of them seem to have cycled between periods of living alone and living with a partner. All of us seem ambivalent about the prospects of long-term success… or maybe it’s resigned and content with our current situations.
Living with partner after partner also seems foreign to me. When I think about the future, I can’t imagine doing that. I can’t imagine having two or three more relationships in which we get serious enough to move in together. And I’m beginning to wonder if that puts some hidden and undue pressure on me that makes me not terribly interested or invested in dating and meeting new people. It’s as though I’m somehow saying – I don’t want to go through all of that a few more times, and I don’t want the pressure of ensuring that the next one is the last one. Maybe next time, I’ll be the one with the precondition of an engagement? That’s usually when I stop trying to envision a future, shrug, and say whatever happens happens.
And yet… when I do think about the future, I don’t think about what other jobs I may have in the next ten or fifteen years, or where else I might live, but instead, I think in terms of color and light and seasons and where/how I’ll spend my time in the warm sunshine and with whom I’ll spend that time. The “with whom,” though it’s a mystery, still seems like some foregone conclusion… still seems to take on greater significance. With whom will I travel and sit at cafes and visit museums and hike etc. etc. etc.? With whom will I enjoy these glorious if not somewhat melancholy fall nights?
Then the other night I had a dream about the ex who moved in and left. Thus began the funk. We were meeting up at my family’s shore house (my family used to rent a house in Jersey for a week every summer). I think we were meeting because she was in town or something casual like that. I had just gotten a dog – another pitbull, and when the ex showed up, the dog woo woo wooed in excitement (the way pitties do) as though he had known her before. The familiarity was jarring.
Maybe it was the dream that got me re-thinking about the Twitter post about living alone. A post I had been contemplating for a few days. Maybe it was the dream, coupled with not having a real clear picture of what the future looks like, that set on a slight sense of mourning. Maybe it’s just October’s long arms scratching the surface of past seasons. Physically, it felt a little heavy on the chest, but light in the spirit – like a fond memory over which I say that was nice. Maybe it’s just the admission that what I still value most is a deep sense of connection, consistency, and commitment – the admission that jobs and places will come and go and will never feel as satisfying/fulfilling as those other intangibles such as know who’s waiting for you at home. Which has the effect of making me ask, “if I’m not focused on the really big and important things in life, what am doing?”
All of this made miss that time in my life – the time before I moved away. A time when my brother and father still talked, a time when I saw my daughter more regularly, a time when we took annual vacations to the shore, a time when I was closer to family and friends.
The funk stayed with me for most of the day. It floated in and out of my thinking. It lingered on my evening walk – a walk that eerily reminded me of fall walks in Philadelphia. I remembered and missed going to Bishop’s Collar (a Philly bar where the ex and I would meet up for a drink after work). I missed getting groceries together and cooking together. I felt the strange urge to cook a big meal. I missed the changing colors of the leaves. I missed the evening walks with the dog – hers and then, a few years later, my own. I missed my cats. I missed Tyler State Park and the leafy suburb streets. Fall, it turns out, makes me miss previous falls – and that particular fall in 2018 heading into 2019, when I last lived with someone, felt overly full and satisfying.
That was it. I was stuck somewhere between what used to be and what might yet be. I was stuck unable to imagine that level of intimacy (going forward) yet easy to remember those small moments from the past. And maybe this is just part of the rebuilding process. A process that, for me, seems to take place in the fall. Find a place (geography) – check. Find a job – check. Establish friendships, routines, relationships (working on it)… re-evaluate what to bring forward into the present… create/co-create a vision for the future. Get lost in the moment and blame it all on fall and its minor discontents.