lately I can’t type
I keep typing the wrong words.
it’s Friday night
It was the longest day of the week, even though I took a long lunch. I left my job at 4:43 PM, just like every other day. I changed my clothes, from work outfit to sweatpants and t-shirt, in the front seat of my car, in the parking garage. I drove towards the park so I could walk my three miles.
When I was a mile from the park, the rain started. I didn’t have a back-up plan, so I went home. After I changed out of my work-out clothes, it stopped raining.
I could have gone to the gym here at my apartment, but walking an hour on the treadmill in front of some godawful TV show that you can’t find the remote to change the channel on – it’s just not the same. Plus, I wouldn’t get to walk an hour, anyway, because other people would be waiting. First I’d wait for them, pretending to ride the little bike while watching the treadmill like a hawk. Then they’d wait for me, glaring at me out of the corners of their eyes while pretending to do the stair thingie, thinking, “C’mon, lady – you’re just walking. I’m gonna run. My exercise choices are more legitimate than yours. Get off the damned treadmill.”
(When I called it our apartment’s “gym”, I meant the living-room-sized room in which they have some gym equipment.)
So I wasted some time online, and then I fell asleep, like I do every Friday night that the kids aren’t here, which normally works out well because then I’m well rested for when my boyfriend comes to pick me up so we can go out.
I considered going out, but I hate to go out alone. What does a single woman do alone on a Friday night? Where would I go? To the local honky-tonk to pick up a guy in a baseball cap that says CAT? To the coffee shop, to sit there staring at my decaffeinated beverage and eavesdropping on pretentious strangers? To the 24-hour Wal-Mart, to wander the aisles with the scum of the earth? To an actual good dance club, where the cover’s $15? No – because you have to park your car far away and then walk. And I’m scared to do that alone at night. Night is when bad people kill and/or steal the purses of lone women on the street. I know this to be true.
So, now it’s midnight, and I’m awake again. And the only thing there is to do is go back to sleep. That’s what I’m going to force myself to do. (You know how hard it is to do that, don’t you?) If I stay awake alone late at night, my brain will get tired and overwrought with all its concerns and I’ll start imagining that I see ghosts and stuff out of the corner of my eye.
(Either that, or ghosts just naturally show up at one A.M., and I don’t know that because I’m usually asleep or at a club then. I think that must be the case, because I always see them when I stay up too late alone. And I’m a rational person. Therefore, they must exist. Man, I’d better hurry up and finish typing this and go to sleep.)
I should have made a plan with my friends or my family. But I didn’t want to make a plan. I wanted to be free and spontaneous on my night alone. (I thought I actually wanted to be alone, to be honest.)
This is what always happened on Friday nights without the kids before I had a boyfriend. I remember it now.
I hate feeling like a loser. I hate being alone. Well – alone on Friday night.
