Intro-, extra-
I like you. I like you in the next room, but I like you.

She lives alone and a lot of the time, works from a little desk across from her bed, next to the wall which is
next to the kitchen table which is
next to the stove,
next to the front door.
An apartment you can do one cartwheel across. Exactly one.

And for exactly half the time, this solitude feels like An Experiment in Solitude. It makes her feel something like Amelie: a little eccentric and maybe even secretly aesthetically fascinating in that Why, Everything’s Tinted Valentine Red! way. Because anything can be true when you’re alone writing and sewing and decoupaging everything you own.
But half the time she feels more like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
[“Frylock, return Carl to the Home.”]

And she has had roommates who have driven her insane by trespassing on her precious personal space and good *lord* but this is a far cry better than that.

Now it’s her, her cat and her music. And much of the time it’s a big exhalation. She gets home and kicks her shoes off and goes to her refrigerator where she will see only her food she’s placed on the shelves of her choosing. And--yes, that old cliche--she drinks right from the container.

But, too: See how the cat runs out to greet whomever comes over? Greets, and flops down on the floor in front of said visitor, belly-up in blatant supplication? In her worst moments she knows that, as her familiar, the cat is nothing but an embarrassingly barefaced depiction of her. The cat is sick of her, wants someone else and so is she and so does she.
And see how the music also greets the people? How tired it must be, of the same set of ears attached to the same brain attached to the same set of memories and associations. It wants more ear canals and daydreams to travel through.
Next year she’ll find another roommate. For now there are moments of good and of bad and maybe it’s winter’s hard end that’s making the bad worse. Or maybe it’s the threat of springtime. Mostly though, she knows it’s just her memory and its irritatingly rose-colored tendencies.