How to Be Alone by Heather Nolan

Author:Heather Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773102863
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2023-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

Two

I sat in my favourite chair, the mod sixties faux leather one that bit my ass when I leaned to one side or the other, and I imagined I looked unreal. Not like the mythical or the imagined, but something less than real.

My apartment held the fragility of newness: furniture so cheap and stiff that everything still felt like cardboard, unused dishes smelling of vinegar and plastic, couch rigid with lack of familiarity with the human form.

For a moment I felt like I was lounging in an IKEA showroom. For a moment I felt like I did not exist at all.

I spun my chair around so as not to face the unease of the room, but to gaze instead out the window, down onto the ever-changing story that is Rue Sainte-Catherine.

When I was still living at home, Chloé and her partner Melissa often let me crash on their couch after a night out. Whenever I was too drunk to go home to Mother and her fuss. I had longed then for my own apartment, like Chloé, though she lived with five others, and Melissa had moved in before third year. They had things of their own, mostly picked up in thrift stores or alleyways, or even dumpsters, like the worn oak rocking chair in the living room.

I don’t know what stopped me from leaving home sooner.

Chloé taught me French, or I picked it up from her. Sometimes I felt like it was a secret language of ours.

Mother never understood why I wanted to study in French.

But we speak English, she said.

Tu se dire comme c’nest pas la faute de nous-mêmes.

Don’t start with that, she said. You know I don’t understand.

I stood at the window with another glass of wine and I ached for classes to begin so I could meet people. It seemed the only way to do so was to participate.

Chloé came with me to check out UQAM. I met her by the Grande Bibliothèque, where she had been researching. She was always researching, ever since her and Melissa had split at the beginning of the summer. Divorced, she called it.

The campus looked more like an assortment of office buildings than a university, scattered across several blocks of downtown at the edge of the Village. At first this had appealed to me. Something different. But now, in the concrete heat, the campus seemed to lack something vital. I thought of the grand lawn that led into the McGill campus, the proud oaks, the classic brick buildings with the mountain rising behind.

Beauty, I said. Chloé looked up from her phone with a blank face, a face that had just re-entered the present.

Hm, she said.

That is what this campus lacks. Beauty.

Chloé smiled.

She said, I was texting a friend who goes here to show us around a bit. I squirmed. N’inquiète pas, she added, he’s straight.

I looked at Chloé, said nothing.

As it turned out, her friend was a sculpture student and he took my request for beauty very seriously. He weaved through the long shadows of the city blocks as the sun glinted on buildings’ glassy peaks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.