On being alone:

Here in this strange city she was alone. When most women of her age would be settling down to a comfortable middle age she was starting a new life. Here in this strange city, though, she can be alone without being pitied. Sometimes days would pass without her speaking to anyone. She had her research, her writing, which absorbed her and sometimes exhausted and depressed her. She had left her home in Singapore to learn to be independent. To even enjoy it. Will she ever though? Living alone was an experiment – an experiment in aloneness the rest of her life. She had always done things in excess. And so she picked a city where she knew nobody to wean her of her dependencies.

Her computer, sitting on the dinning table, an Ikea table, in her two-roomed apartment, was the focal point of her life. It sat in front of the bay window, the best feature of the apartment, framed by two trees -  a Bottle Brush and a Ficus tree. Many a time she had watched entranced as the sun played on the waxy, dark, green leaves of the Ficus and caught glimpses of the cookoo as it hopped shyly from branch to branch. More often she heard it than saw it.

The bay window was the reason she bought the apartment, along Kooyong Road in Armadale, five minutes walking distance from one of Melbourne’s elegant suburban shopping streets. This was a major purchase and the first independent decision of her life. How she agonized over that decision.  But the bay window with the sun streaming into the apartment on a winter’s day is a delight. These days little things delighted her.  It always did. Only she wasn’t aware that it is the little things that delight.

Related Posts