Solitaire

“He’s flirting with you,” my father said decisively, hearing only my side in a telephone conversation in the car. Later that night, the other party to the conversation writes me a sort of online monologue, saying that he felt that he was bothering me, hoped not, didn’t mean to. “I merely have good intentions and free time,” I read, and once again, as in basically every other conversation I’d had with him, my mind calls up a picture of him sitting alone, in his apartment, feeling the holes in the empty space that open up when a two-person residence becomes a one-person residence. These thoughts of him always evoke the paradoxical feeling that I experience each time my parents leave the country: a cheerful smile kept plastered on for my grandmothers’ sake, accompanied by a temporary default mode of mild depression manifested as the desire to watch television and speak to no one for two or three days. I know how it feels, to drown in the suddenly increased air of an apartment. So, unlike my father, I read the conversation like an onion. Perhaps there is a veiled flirtation underneath the casual, friendly cajolement to make time to see a movie. But this strikes me as irrelevant because, at a deeper level, I perceive an emotional shout for someone to provide him with an excuse to leave the house, to join the outside world, to forget just how much more space he now has to himself. The glimmers of loneliness that peek through ordinary strings of words seem to compel me, despite troublesome over-layers. Maybe it’s a preemptive strike; after all, my parents are leaving, once again, in a few weeks. On the other hand, maybe it’s a corollary of a truism: if misery loves company, then misery just might have the duty to provide company.