Decision

Offered prompt: What question are you afraid to know the answer to?

“Just take a quiet moment,” Levent, my spiritual healer, says to me as I sit in the circle with my fellow students.

I breathe in. Not fully, as he’s asking because I’m biting the inside of my lip to stop myself from blurting out, “But I tried everything.”

I am full of self-righteous “hurt.” In my thirties, and married for some eleven years, I had been sharing yet again the recurring pain of never being first in my husband’s eyes. It isn’t another woman, but Allen’s work in film and television production that always takes precedence.

I’m constantly waiting alone at restaurant tables long after our reservation time. Or he routinely calls to say he’s running late as the food sizzles in the pan just minutes before he’s scheduled to walk through the door. How many vacations have we canceled at the last minute because of a change in Allen’s work schedule? “We’ll go next year” is his endless refrain.

But while these “infractions” are painful, what pierces my heart are the countless instances he’s chosen to work on holidays, our anniversary, and my birthday, leaving me alone when I was supposed to be with a loved one.

“Look, I have to shoot this concert in Germany the week of November 23,” Allen announced a few weeks ago. “I know that’s over Thanksgiving. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Okay, this time I’m going to do it differently, I told myself at that moment. I’m not going to sit at home alone feeling sorry for myself, damn it.

I called my father. That was a no-go. He and my stepmother were going out of town. I called my best friend. She already had plans, too. Then it struck me. Wait, I’ll volunteer at a soup kitchen. In New York City, one after another of the churches and nonprofits I reached out to said nope, they didn’t need anyone.

Finally, I found a halfway house where they didn’t think there would be many folks to feed, but I was welcome to come. On that bleak, blustery Thursday, I’d made my way downtown, walking through Central Park with the wind whipping through the bare brown tree branches.

When I got to the gray, institutional building, a stout woman answered the door. “There are three of us in the kitchen, but it seems that all the residents had somebody to spend the holiday with, so there’s no one to serve for the moment.” I sat with the women, listening to them banter, buried in my aloneness. I watched the minute hand slowly tick away until it was finally obvious that we should just clean up and pack away the food they’d made.

“So,” I say to Levent now, “I did absolutely everything I could in order not to be alone again, and it still didn’t work.”

Small of stature, short-cropped beard, black with just flecks of gray, Levent looks straight at me. “I want you to close your eyes.”

Sighing, I do as he asks.

“Now go deep inside. Roll back to when Allen told you he would be out of town. Can you locate that small iota of a moment when you decided that no matter what you did, you wanted to prove you’d end up alone?”

“But, but but…” I desperately want to protest again. Instead, I run through the phone calls to Dad, my best friend, and the churches, and see myself at the halfway house. Way down in the crevices, I feel a glimmer of truth. I nod to Levent, realizing, energetically, that I didn’t truly, honestly, really, fully want any of it to work out. If I ended up alone, I’d “earn” sympathy from others—a “poor me” being my consolation.

Levent’s soft voice drifts in. “Have you located that little kernel of negative pleasure you got from being proven right?”

“Yes,” I admit, flushing my face.

“It’s okay. Now you know, you weren’t a victim. You carry a false belief that you will always be alone, and then, on the subtlest level, you tend to bring it about. This belief came way before Allen.”

It strikes me, well, of course. My mother, who sabotaged one relationship after another, drilled into me since childhood: “We Remer women will always be alone.” Hysterical is historical. This level of abandonment, I feel, with Allen, is my childhood wound.

The realization isn’t an instantaneous cure. Decades later, it can still hurt like hell being alone on dates that feel significant. But I do try hard not to play the poor me card. Sometimes I have the wherewithal to make plans that do work out because my intent is clear…and sometimes I don’t have what it takes and let the loneliness just be what it is.