This is a day in the life of "Lone Girl."
Lone Girl wakes up, sees the light breaking through the blinds and the red digital clock reads noon. She tries to remember her dream and it comes back to her in bits and pieces. Dreams are easier to remember without the incessant, startling blare of an alarm.
She lazily reaches over to her bed stand and checks social media. Her friends from uni are all over the globe, partying with faces she didn’t know in places she had never seen. She smiles and drags herself out of bed.
According to Lone Girl, one of the best things about holing up in your bedroom over break, completely alone, is that there is no need to put any effort into your appearance. No makeup, smudged glasses, hair tossed up in authentic messy buns, sweatshirts with food stains on them and finally, no pants. Pants are a serious offense to relaxation. It’s a huge deal. Anyways, this is Lone Girl in her natural state. There’s no risk of running into a professor when crawling to the kitchen to grab food, and definitely no risk of running into beautiful people looking like a ghoulish imp emerging from its cave if you’re safe at home.
Lone Girl looks in the fridge and contemplates between cereal or spaghetti. It's noon after all.
She carries her bowl of cereal in one hand, and a cooling plate of spaghetti for an hour later in the other, and she turns on her weird, but positively epic playlist of songs ranging from Dead Kennedys to Joseph Haydn, Gaslight Anthem to literally anything on Chill Nation’s Youtube channel. This playlist hasn’t been played without headphones in three months since the last time she was completely alone. No one else could understood the transition from hardcore punk rock, the feeling of starting a bloody riot to chillstep and the feeling of watching the sun go down and the sky fade to black. This playlist was a compilation of every song she ever took a liking too, no categorization, no organization. Exposing this playlist to others would be like baring a piece of her soul. It’s unheard of.
Then, Lone Girl starts to write. She writes best in afternoons or at night.
She writes about anything and everything. Things that cross her mind, her deepest emotions, plaguing worries, things that make her happiest, and things no one but her knew about.
She writes passages like, “There's a strange feeling in the air, like you're waiting for someone or something and it could either be the best moment in your life or a heartbreaking tragedy, but all you have is a backpack of books and nothing to do but wait.” She decides that that passage feels too serious, too heavy for a time of relaxation such as this. So she writes about constellations and sunrises, rainbow fairy lights and burning fires, but the kind that lie in one’s heart. She discovers things about herself, like how lighter things are much harder to write than the heavier stuff. She realizes she has to figure out why.
A few minutes later, she tires of writing and introspection and switches to guitar. She plays the intro to a song she’s been learning for a week now. She likes to take her sweet time learning music. The process is beautiful to her. She plays the same four chords over and over until her fingers hurt because the callouses had softened away over time and now, every touch felt raw.
She puts the guitar away, eats the warm spaghetti and watches Youtube videos. Then, she reads a bit, then writes again, having refilled her cup of inspiration. Sometimes she lays down in silence and the only movement in the room is the slight movement her body makes when her heart beats. She finds this cool, how strong one’s heart beat is that it can move something so much larger than itself, just by being itself.
To Lone Girl, there are no expectations here. No deadlines or imminent peril. Just contentment.
This is how she spends her days, secure in her own company. Of course, there are a few hours every other day she must go out, put on a pair of pants and adjust her messy bun to look more presentable. A few hours when she must lock up her wild, impossible dreams so they don’t whirlwind into sensible conversations with outside people. After greeting friends and encountering strangers, she always returns home and becomes Lone Girl once more.
The time comes around when she can no longer be Lone Girl. When that time comes there will be less time for warm baths, less time to raid the fridge, less time to let her mind wander to distant places. But upon departure, Lone Girl’s eyes sparkle, her skin glows, those awful bags have exceptionally disappeared with rest, and there’s a new sense of positivity and alacrity towards life. She had only a few short days, but so much self-healing was accomplished in that period of solace and comfort!
Lone Girl stands on the sidewalk, bags in each hand, and watches a car drive away into the distance. She smiles and goes back to bed wondering what dreams she will wake up to in another three months.
