The Way I Was

No one wants to be alone on a sunny day, but what is it about a cool, cloudy fall day that goes so well with absolute silence?

For the first time in what seems like many years, I am alone on such a day, enjoying my brain. My brain is ordinarily on loan to three monkey-sized tyrants and filled with their thoughts, requests and random gibberish. Sometimes, when I am trying to write an email or even make sense of conversation with another adult, I have to actually tell them that I NEED MY BRAIN FOR A FEW MINUTES.

So it's nice to have it to myself today. The sudden feeling of independence made a pleasant memory bubble up in my mind; the memory of moving into my first apartment.

It was a dump of a one bedroom about half a mile or so from the campus of Illinois State, where I was a then a junior. My rent was $360 a month and that included furniture and utilities (wow!).

For the first time in my life, I was living without my family, without a roommate, with no one in the world whose opinion to consult but ME.

I remember walking to Jewel-Osco on a cool cloudy day and buying a broom, a mop, cleaning products, eggs, soup, milk. I remember thinking that $50 was a lot for groceries (ha!). I remember putting everything away in my apartment- broom in the broom closet, milk in the fridge and thinking how empty the giant fridge looked with my groceries for one- how big the broom closet seemed with my broom and cans of Campell's Chicken'n'Stars.

I know this probably makes me selfish, but oddly enough I remember it as one of the best days of my life.