Solitude

My houseguest is gone and I have spent the day reading, eating strawberries with brown sugar, napping, and tidying my apartment. I don't know when I became a person who needs so much solitude--I grew up in a family. I had brothers and sisters. I shared a bedroom and liked it. I have lived with roommates and lovers, and yet, here I am--someone who needs so much quiet and who starts to feel like the oxygen has been sucked out of the room after too many days in a row with people.

I had a dream while I was napping that while I slept men moved into my apartment. I woke up and my things were all scrambled around the apartment, broken and shoved into heaps (oddly, there was a Christmas tree, askew in the corner weeping tinsel all over the floor). At first I thought there had been an earthquake, and I marveled that I could have slept through it. But then the men returned, hefting their own furniture. One of them started unpacking his clothes into a dresser drawer. "What are you doing here?" I asked him, "I live here."

"Oh no," he shook his head at me with a menacing smile, "They found out about you. They know about the research with the praying mantises."

I protested that I had never done research on any sort of insect--my degree is in the humanities--but they wouldn't listen. "Have you ever been engaged?" one of them asked. I told him that, in fact, I'd been married. "We might be able to work out a way for you to stay," he said.

This was the point when I left the apartment and subsequently woke up.

Yeah. Do I find it notable that female praying mantises are known for killing their mates by biting their heads off after sex? Sure I do. My subconscious has a wicked sense of humor, I'm thinking.

All of which is to say I feel like I won the lottery just to be able to sit quietly in my place and putter around with only Nic the cat for company. P, I and I are going dancing tonight and that should satisfy any need for human contact.

As an aside, I finally finished Middlesex, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It was so good. I have Saturday, the latest Ian McEwan, on deck, but I'm worried it will be a disappointment.

I'm also really excited that Jeanette Winterson has a new novel, (Lighthousekeeping). There are a couple of extracts on her site:

Chapter 1--Two Atlantics

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.

I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that--even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass.
His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
Shoals of babies vied for life.
I won.

I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate--Shepherd's Pie, Goulash, Risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once--what a disaster--and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.
Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived ever since.

And so on. I'm hoping maybe it's a return to the sort of novel The Passion is and away from some of her more recent books, which, slave to narrative that I am, I haven't enjoyed as much.