https://sweetlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/On-Homemaking-Reading-1.mp3

On Homemaking

When I was eight, a young woman died alone in her apartment. And when I was nine, and ten, and every year after, several women a year, I’m sure, forever. I overheard these kinds of things on the news, or else from a group of adults talking in tones of fear and regret, tones which I understood early in life and never wanted my name to be coated in. “I don’t want to live alone,” I told to my mom, hot tears running down my small, freckled face. “You won’t,” she answered, perplexed, “you’ll never have to.”

*

The building was old and clunky: a wide staircase leading to the porch that no one used, a small, vestibuled entryway with brass mailboxes, full of credit card offers and coupons, pizza menus. The day I moved in, it was 99 degrees, and a friend came to help, so did my parents. We sweat, all of us. Inside my apartment, whose walls I painted orange and mint and Grecian blue, there was a door that couldn’t open, that presumably led to the basement. There was a spackled- up window that seemed like an old pulley system connecting upstairs to downstairs, although the building was so changed by that point, that I could not orient myself to its former turn-of-the- century life. I could only gather bits of information I had read about the neighborhood and these gigantic old houses split awkwardly into apartments. The bathroom, faded white to yellow, was dirty, no matter how much I scrubbed it. The place seemed haunted. Mostly by my longing.

*

To be single and live alone as a woman in your thirties means holding an entire space. This is something to be revered, though I don’t think society knows it yet. The way I wake up with myself, remain faithful to small, private rituals, witness my own depression, the paces of my life. Each day I appear to myself in the painted gold mirror I hang in my bedroom and do not turn away. I was 31 and had previously lived in cities where having roommates was always a financial necessity. I left New York many years earlier, partially after realizing I wasn’t going to get into a relationship and couldn’t take living with new roommates all the time, and couldn’t take hearing the roommates I loved, falling in love through the apartment walls, thin as razors, and couldn’t afford to have a one-bedroom apartment without having a two-income household.

*

In Philadelphia, I dated, introduced people to my life, my apartment, my cat. I was messy; I’ve always been messy. One date joked how much they admired my way of cleaning up—piling everything into laundry baskets that sat on the floor, something they didn’t know I only did when I might want the person coming over to fuck me. Another told me he liked the colors of my walls, asked, “is this ok,” and then, “is this ok,” as I raised my arms over my head so that he could take off my shirt. I once said an awkward good-bye to a date outside of the corner bar down the street from my apartment, thinking he wasn’t interested in me. Back home, I sat on my dirt-moss loveseat and texted, teasing him about how he crossed his arms when I tried to hug him, a last-ditch effort to flirt. He texted back immediately. He didn’t think I was interested in him. Come over, I answered. Bring beer.


Katy Scarlett (Instagram: @scarlettmooon) is an educator, poet, and essayist from New Jersey. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MA in Art History from Hunter College, CUNY. Katy’s writing is published or forthcoming in BlackbirdBroad Street ReviewCRAFT, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, Hunger Mountain Review, and Cimarron Review. Her favorite sweet treat is chocolate covered pretzels.

1 COMMENT

  1. Beautifully articulated fears–of loneliness rather than aloneness–as well as successes–living on one’s own, defining one’s space and therefore one’s self.

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