Please Leave
The Deliciousness of Being Left Alone
A few days ago I saw this reel of a person I follow on Instagram dancing maniacally in the hallway of her home because her husband had just left her. Not left left her. Just the regular kind of left. Errands and whatnot.
Actually, do not keep reading until you watch her reel. It’s worth it because Arielle, and her facial expressions and her hand motions/dance moves are perfection, but also because the rest of what I’m exploring probably won’t make sense without the context.
As you can see, she was having FEELINGS about her husband leaving the house. And she was trying to understand why it felt so good.
And there I was so high on the relatability of her whole vibe that I sent the reel to a bunch of friends who I knew would get it, and I even left a comment - which I rarely do on people’s posts who I don’t know IRL because parasocial relationships are weird etc.
My note was basic - Wait till you have kids and they ALSO LEAVE WITH THE HUSBAND. The most delicious feeling.
And let’s just say it hit a nerve and has now been liked more than 19,000 times - even more likes than the comment Arielle’s hilarious husband made - simply writing ‘I can see this.’
Now, every single time I refresh my phone I get notified about likes and responses. A stadium full of overstimulated mothers doing body rolls in their own doorways in unhinged solidarity. It makes me think about how the truthiest truth really has such a way of uniting us.
But of course, the Internet never fails to ruin a good mood and someone snapped back to my comment with, “Why do you tell people to get married and have kids if everything is better when they’re gone?”
And I get their point. But what I want to tell them is there’s a flavor of freedom that I’m experiencing because I live a full, noisy, heart-spilling-over life with human sunbeams who each have enough personality and energy to power a small island. So then, when the house finally goes quiet, I get this wild, fizzy feeling like I’ve broken into my own life.
The chaos of a full family life and the holiness of solitude are not opposites. They’re halves of my necessary whole. The deliciousness of being left alone in my home exists because I deeply and fiercely love the humans who fill this house to the brim when they’re here.
And there’s another layer too—when my house is empty and silent, it feels like I’m reunited with myself and suddenly, anything is possible. I could call a friend, sweep my floors, eat my weight in cheese, watch seven minutes of four different documentaries, or zone out at my kitchen counter thinking about a new thing I’ve learned (and recently it’s the fact that every single time you shuffle a deck of cards, the order of those cards is unique. So a deck of cards has NEVER been shuffled into the exact same order in the entire history of human card shuffling. IS YOUR MIND AS BLOWN AS MINE WAS/IS WITH THIS INFORMATION?)
Ironically everyone just got home and now my coherent thoughts have no chance competing with Phoenix playing Eye of the Tiger on his saxophone and WHO KNEW A SAXOPHONE WAS THE LOUDEST INSTRUMENT EVER INVENTED so I’ll end it here.