Are You Here Alone, Too?
Marina, from nearby Bucerías, and I have close to the same years. In Spanish, instead of being a number of years old, you have those years. When I say I’m traveling alone, she pulls away like she’s touched a hot stove, asks again. “Sí, es la verdad,” I confirm. “Estoy aquí sola.” I circle my arms wide so aquí (here) means this village, or the earth.
Her eyes crumple. I am touched by her concern. She has four kids—tres hijas y un hijo. She grins, pointing. From the nearby beach, a fat-cheeked toddler emerges from the crowd, hand in hand with a man. “Guapos, no?”she lilts. Their arrival is the breeze to the embers of her eyes.
From the moment we spill from our mothers’ wombs, love (for those who are lucky) is pressed like powder into our skin. Our need for others is written on our bones, which can’t yet hold us up. We’re barely past pulling ourselves up on furniture, toddling bowlegged away from the arms of our caregivers toward all the bright, shiny things we can lay our eyes on, when dictators like trope and society and religion begin to shape how need and love will work in us. Can you recall your first ideas of romance? The buds of desire for what your years will have?
How does it go? Boy meets girl. (Girl meets girl. Boy meets boy.) An increasing number of us, especially women, are, instead, an equation of one. Girl. Boy.1
UK writer Emma John asks, “Why are increasing numbers of women choosing to be single?”
John wants women who, like herself, have chosen to be unpartenered to shuck off the shame of misogynist terms like spinster (originally “a not-unrespectable class of tradespeople), reminding us unattached women were the original pioneers of female professions, “philanthropists and agitators, educators and explorers.”
Choice. For some, this is no doubt the full truth of the equation. But what of those who long to agitate, work, explore, grow old in tandem, only to have that possibility seem out of reach no matter how their hearts gallop toward it? Can we tease out the threads of longing from those of should?
In’s 1981 “Cowgirls All the Way,” women compete in a man’s arena—sort of.
Early on in the piece on rodeo queens, Carroll urges us to remember these women’s stunning feats of athleticism with a description so gorgeous it lassoes a sorrow from the hollow of my belly. I swallow back a quiet sob. I know what’s coming. Still, I’m taken aback by all that is woven, alongside pride and possibility, in Carroll’s lariat: The TV crew capturing the “‘best horsewomen in America’ wearing their nighties.” The queens’ instruction not to drink alcohol, replete with a room-to-room check. The requirements of formfitting outfits, attractiveness, and unused wombs. The indignity of performing those feats on green horses, while the cream of the crop is stabled not far away, retained for the rodeo kings.
Why should I be shocked by the extent of the arena’s transformation? Only four years earlier, women still needed a man’s signature to get a credit card in the United States. Only last year, the US Supreme Court reasserted its rights to make rules about the use of wombs.
Nicole Hardy tells the story of preserving more than her womb in “Single, Female, Mormon, Alone.”
Can you imagine never knowing the bliss of being touched by hands that seek the pleasure of your body? Because Hardy’s religion told her motherhood by way of marriage was the only way to fulfill her eternal purpose and because she loved her religion and because the only path to womanhood offered her didn’t open up before her despite her wanting it badly, she denied herself, “trapped in adolescence.”
***
Leaving Marina and her family behind, I climb the hills toward Bucerías and a cemetery like the burst of a crayon box, fabric flowers and colored glass bottle bits glinting against white stone. I think of the years I’ve spent partnered, often clumsily, or actively yearning to be. I feel joyful—mostly—to be a woman on her own, free to follow her own bliss. I’ll take a lover in the village.
I won’t fathom how many more years I’ll have of the same—love, loss, independence, yearning, repeat. I’m not yet close to asking: What it is I’m denying myself in my quiet insistence that, whatever amazingness periods of non-partnership bring, they are temporary and would be even better with someone at my side? In what state am I trapped?
I’m free, I’ll tell myself. And also my sister and I will prep for a backpacking trip, and she’ll lament her husband not joining us, half-joking that he likes to carry the heavier stuff to make the journey more enjoyable for her. Wow, what would that be like? I’ll wonder, the weight of my preponderance plunking into the pack next to my stove.
’s brilliant memoir We Are the Luckiest chronicles her journey to choosing sobriety and herself.
In one of many poignantly candid moments, this one like a mirror to me, McKowen shares how she seared her own heart hungering for someone, a someone who has mistreated her, to choose her. I’ve sat with myself and friends, women and men alike, in the depths of despair that begs: What is so wrong with me that I am fated to forever carry my burden alone?
“And I wish to God you’d leave me / and I wish to God you’d stay,” rumble-rasps Tom Waits (“Please Call Me, Baby”). “If I exorcise my devils / Well my angels may leave too.” Of course. It’s our wounds—and our belief they’re inextricable from who we are—that cause us to wound ourselves and others.
***
It’ll be miles and years from Bucerías when I spend two months traveling alongside a man whose presence as partner I know will be temporary. We’ll scale mountains, paddle snow-fed lakes, throw our faces skyward as Northern Lights paint the sky magic. Still, it will be the moments when we’re working side by side on our laptops and his hand trails back to brush my knee, in a gesture that feels as innate as a toddler looking back to safety, that will take my breath away. And though I’ll have promised myself I won’t, I’ll feel lost, unchosen when we part ways.
In Kathryn Schulz’s memoir Lost and Found, she finds her wife.
The unfolding of the pair’s coming together is a joyous discovery of how to love each other. There’s a moment where Schulz describes how they learn to fight, not less but better. It’s not a matter of molding. Each learns she doesn’t need to ask the other to change, only to trust each will return again and again.
And In “Sleep Well My Love,” publishes the letter of a soldier to the love he lost to war.
Brian writes to Keith of “Fond goodbyes on a secluded beach beneath the star-studded velvet of an African night, and the tears that would not be stopped as I stood atop the sea-wall and watched your convoy disappear.” That two WWII GIs find each other and fight for their love despite what it could have cost them and that the love would endure years later, even after only one made the journey home.
What power these loves hold. No wonder we keep seeking.
and evoke The Power of Breath and what it can do because our ancestors learned to “marry the physiology of the respiratory system with the engineering of wood and metal.”
Rather and Kirschner point to Mozart’s Gran Partita, performed by 12 wind instruments and a double bass. They draw our attention to what Mozart’s rival, Salieri, said of the symphony in Amadeus. It is “filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”
On a hill in southern Arizona one late evening, alone in my van, I am suddenly surrounded by coyotes. They sing to the crescent moon just feet from where I lay, seemingly in a ring around me. I press my face to the window and weep. They stay for a full two, maybe three minutes. The magic of their yipping, yowling chorus seeps into my marrow, another gift contained in the years I have thanks to my unfillable longing and where it draws me.
As deeply as our need for others is etched into us, the urge for flight, for independence, tumbles rapidly on its heels, clumsily pulling itself up and away. Maybe I misread Marina’s reaction that day near Bucerías. Maybe along with empathy for my loneliness, there was a longing too. Maybe she saw in me a reflection of a freedom she’d never known.
UK reporter Emma John notes that the number of uncoupled, never married women is up in all ages, with an additional half a mil from 40 to 50 between 2002 and 2018 (UK’s Office for National Statistics). She points to similar findings outside the Western world. A Google search will net beaucoup reports of the similar statistics. And a recent UCLA survey study says Gen Z no longer wants stories about sex and romance.
Holly, this was beautiful. Your reflections are so heartfelt. The writing is incredible. And the way you explore the nuance of going it alone is wonderful. A great piece.
Below are a few lines I really liked, (but there were many more):
“Their arrival is the breeze to the embers of her eyes.”
“Our need for others is written on our bones, which can’t yet hold us up.” — such a good line!
“Carroll urges us to remember these women’s stunning feats of athleticism with a description so gorgeous it lassoes a sorrow from the hollow of my belly.”
Beautifully written. I'm often struck by the irony that I have a partner and kids while my sister is single and childfree. She has always loved kids and got far more attention from boys growing up. While her single/childfree status is not entirely by design, she has learned to lean into it and take full advantage of her freedom. I know she's also lonely sometimes. Meanwhile, I yearn for solitude and even amongst the bustle of family, I'm sometimes lonely, too. Whatever path you take, or find yourself on, there are trade-offs, always.