Better off alone

A bitesize freebie post this week for a cluster of reasons, some I can’t tell you (…yet, sorry!) and some I can (my mother was visiting).

“But don’t you worry about it?” they said. “Being left alone?”

I was talking to an acquaintance in the cramped, sweaty bowels of a south London nightclub. I hadn’t seen them for several months, since a previous party and we’d accidentally done that thing where you ask the other how they’re doing and find yourself swapping answers that are far too honest. It transpired they’d been anxious lately, which took the form of ruminating on their current singlehood. Such thoughts always led to the same nightmare vision: a future where they were elderly, with no partner, and forsaken by friends. Alone.

At the time, when they flipped the question back on me, I just laughed in surprise and said, honestly: “Oh, I don’t think that far ahead”.

But we exchanged more than words; the conversation was a contagion of prang. Since that chat, I can’t stop thinking ahead. The future has come to haunt me. I am plagued by dark fantasies of abandonment in my old age. Falling down in a — mine? a faceless landlord’s? —house and having no one to call. Struggling to pull a battered shopping trolley onto a bus, hoping a kind stranger will come to my rescue. Voice croaky when greeting the postman because it hasn’t been used for days. Talking to the neighbourhood cats because who else is there to testify to the fact I still exist? I worry less about passing away and no one noticing because once I’m dead, I won’t care. But to live like a ghost… The thought is too much to bear.