Hello, reader! This is the fourth original essay published in Maple Suggests. If you're new here, I send suggestions every Thursday based on things that have inspired me throughout the week and an essay once a month, usually memoir-style, about accepting personal truths and the crusade that is existing in the world. My essays are paywalled in the hopes that I can make enough to cover the cost of my brilliant editor! If you would like to support this newsletter, it’s $5/month or $30/year. My first three essays are not paywalled, however, and if you'd like to read them before you're sold, they're linked in my About page. Thank you for everything. I could not be more thankful for you. ❤️
On Trying To Be Alone
I was in Istanbul. It was August, and I walked alone.
Turn right onto Bog-az-kess-en Ka-dess-EE. Google Maps' robotic audio directions were guiding me to my destination. Each instruction was a hilarity as the automated American voice could do nothing else but glitch through the names of Turkish streets with stereotypical American inelegance. This must be like hearing American English if you don't understand it, I thought. How ugly, angular — but amusing in its bold awkwardness. I looked around, wondered if I seemed like a tourist. My air pods were tucked snugly in my ears, my phone out of sight in my bag so I didn't appear to be following a map. This was a tip I'd learned living in New York, a place I'd called home for ten years and still couldn't confidently navigate parts of: listening to walking directions through headphones. You look like you know where you're going and no one is the wiser you're actually just a dead battery away from being totally lost.
I crossed the road to soak in the sunny side of the street and took stock of all I passed. Stray cats. Children playing together with broken toys behind rusted gates, in front of colorful homes. Fat wafts of smells, fleeting and jarring. Strangers, many of them walking with companions. But many, like me, without.
—
I was in Istanbul for a friend's wedding. I'd arrived the day prior and, mere hours after I landed, met up with some college friends of Yalda, the bride. I'd never met any of the college friends before, but Yalda knew I'd be traveling alone and added me to a WhatsApp group. I was grateful for the gesture; I'd not originally intended to travel by myself to this wedding across the world, but there I was.
The college friends had all congregated in a hookah bar a short walk from my hotel and by the time I showed up, their snack plates were platters of crumbs and smears of jelly. Their energy was easy, kind. They sat around a table with a massive hookah made from a severed melon in the middle, and once I slid in, one of the friends offered me a disposable mouthpiece to partake. Smoking hookah has never really been my thing, but when traveling, I tend to do as the Romans do — so we smoked and chatted. They were a group of six; three couples, one of them recently married.
"So you're here by yourself?" someone asked.
"I am," I clarified, blowing fruity smoke above our heads. I was pretty sure Yalda had informed them of my recent breakup, but I volunteered the information anyway. "Thanks for adopting me, y'all," I said sheepishly.
"We're happy to have you!" the married woman said. She'd just finished recounting her and her husband's day, recalling the itinerary she'd fastidiously organized. Tomorrow would be equally as scheduled and I'd be tagging along as the seventh wheel. "Is meeting at eight a.m. good for everyone?" she asked the table.
The two men in the gay couple shared a glance. "Could we do like, nine-thirty instead?"
All of us made it to the meet-up spot on time the next day, even though the gay men and I had spent hours after the hookah bar dancing in a highly foggy club drinking vodka sodas to the pulse of a DJ. The married woman — our not-hungover leader — led us to our first stop, a restaurant called Nova, where we were guided to a rooftop and given a table under an awning. It was the second time in two days I realized just how awkward it is to be seated at a table with couples as a single person, so I let everyone else choose seats first before I scooted myself in at the end of the square table. It was already a scorching hot day, even in the shade. Someone said something about it.
It was conversation like this for the next little while — surface-level kind of conversation exchanged by people who've seen a lot of each other lately — and I noticed how little I was participating. I couldn't help but feel a twinge of longing witnessing the small gestures of the couples; in these situations when I used to have a partner, there was someone whose hand I could hold in comfortable silence, to rely on to fill conversational lulls, or talk with quietly on the side. My ex had memorized the handbook for how I operate in the mornings. We would've ordered the same black coffee, perhaps a juice, maybe tried to find a local newspaper we could scour together. But he wasn't here. I was not a part of any pair anymore, and being in a foreign city without him, engaging in stiff morning conversation with strangers without him, felt like standing in the middle of a crowded subway car with no access to a handrail; I could rely on strangers to hold me up, but there was no way around it being a little awkward to lean on them.
I realized with disappointment that I was unsure if I wanted to be there, but these folks were so welcoming that I mentally slapped myself. It would be a fun day, damn it. When the waiter came by and asked us how we were, I said, "Good!" with what I hoped was believable energy, and ordered a coffee and a juice, which ended up being a glass of mostly milk and some kind of sickly-sweet liquid the color of Mountain Dew. I sipped both slowly and tried not to think of the jokes my ex and I would have made about it.
Soon, I understood why we'd started the day at the seemingly middle-of-the-road restaurant; attached to it was a pay-to-snap Instagram experience, a small set overlooking the city built like an elaborate Turkish tea moment complete with brightly-colored pillows, fake fruit, a plastic silver tea set, and a rack of "traditional" garb you could pay extra to wear for your shots. Stuff like that makes me want to curl into a ball and disappear — and even the married woman decided it was too much to fork over for a photo — so we all ended up taking a picture by the outdoor stairwell instead, a mosque and the industrial accoutrements of commercial roofs behind us.
However, after a selfie-stick photo of all seven of us, one of the men gently laid a hand on my shoulder. "Do you mind taking one of all of us?" he asked, indicating the couples, everyone but me.
"Oh! Oh my gosh, of course not!" I said. And I didn't. These were old friends, people who loved each other who would no doubt make more memories later, after this trip, probably for many years to come. I wondered how many of them even knew my last name.
"One, two, three..." I said, and proceeded to tap the phone screen camera button over and over, waiting for them all to move slightly between each snap. I knew going into the day I would be, in more ways than one, the odd woman out. But I also knew then, as they huddled together, posing in that second nature way old friends do, that this was the debut of it: my role for the rest of our time together.
All that day we weaved through mosques and cemeteries, spice markets and bazaars, each stop a moment to document in the sharp resolution of someone's phone. At one point, we were in a public garden and I'd just captured the six of them sitting on a stone wall. "Okay, looks good!" I'd said. The married woman approached me among the scattered "thank yous" and took her phone from my hands. "Do you want me to take your picture?" she asked with kindness. I thought of a time I was in Iceland for another wedding; a friend had ranted about couples taking selfies. Why do you need your dumb faces in the photo of a beautiful landscape?
Because love, I thought then, thinking of my ex and I beaming in front of the rolling hills of Blaenau Ffestiniog, the beaches of Biarritz, the flowers of Negril. I thought that same thing now. It felt so vulnerable, so raw, somehow embarrassing to be photographed alone. "No, I'm okay, but thank you," I said, and we continued to our next stop.
—
Turn right on Kem-eer-all-tee-EE Ka-dess-EE. The morning of the wedding, I was on my way to a hammam that had been recommended to me by a colleague who used to live in Istanbul. If you do nothing else, do this, she'd said.
I didn't actually know her that well, but once I rounded the corner and saw my destination, I vowed I would take her word for anything. The place was stunning in a way most stunning things are in an ancient city: old, aching with story. It was a bath house built in 1580, a domed, stone structure with only the most necessary updated features: a polished wooden door, an accessibility ramp, a modernized reception area.
"Hi," I said to a receptionist. I was flushed from the walk and the soft, sauna-like air of the lobby. "I have an appointment."
"Just you?" the receptionist asked.
The main space was a square-shaped, open area comprised of two levels: the top floor for sleek, small changing rooms and lockers, the bottom for a lounge area with cushioned seating and a gurgling fountain in the middle. It didn't appear to be busy, though the receptionist had informed me the hammam was fully booked for the day; I saw only a few robed customers hanging around, specifically two model-esque women in one of the corners, their tea cups drained, legs shiny, slouched in that way only two people so familiar with each other can slouch and sit together. I was led to a tiny table near the fountain, given a cup of tea, and told to await further instruction.
I thought of the events of the trip thus far: buying the most expensive item of clothing I've ever owned with money from my own now-unnecessary wedding savings fund. Dancing with the Persian family members of the bride and groom on a rooftop at the welcome dinner in said expensive item. Being surrounded by people, whether it was the college friends or others, moment by moment, hour after hour. None of it was so different from the way I'd been operating all summer, filling my calendar with beach hangs and bar crawls and late-night dates. I'd just made the biggest, hardest, seemingly craziest decision I could think of, to leave a partner I'd been with for nearly nine years, and I was in no way ready to be alone with that decision. I was in no way ready to be alone at all. But by the morning of my hammam appointment, I was exhausted and craved some mindless downtime. Of course, since the breakup, the "mindless" part was ambitious, but there was always hope.
I was starting to feel awkward as the only person in the relaxation area wearing pants and shoes when I was approached by an employee who gave me a quick run of show: I'd lock my things in a changing room upstairs, don a robe, and an attendant would guide me to the bathing area. The woman I was paired with made me feel instantly safe; she had arms meant for cradling, a mouth for laughing. She held my hand as if I were her own daughter and led me into the bathing chamber.
The humidity engulfed me. We were now inside a round room made almost completely of white-gray marble with antique-looking bathing stations spaced evenly around the perimeter. Each station was comprised of a small bench carved into the wall paired with what looked like an ornate little shrine for a waterspout, and in the middle of the room was a raised slab of heated marble, a few half-or-fully naked women sprawled on top, eyes closed. My bath attendant led me to it and untied my robe with trained hands.
I laid down on the stone. I covered my lower half with a towel but left my breasts bare, their pink centers pointing upwards to a magnificent convex ceiling spotted with stars. Or rather, I thought, drowsiness descending, star-shaped cutouts. Pockets of emptiness that let the light through.
—
I’ve never had any issues being by myself — as in, simply hanging around in a space with my own thoughts and no one else present. Ever since childhood I’ve craved alone time to create and think and reset; my parents will vouch for the hours upon hours I spent alone in my room as a kid, writing and twirling, enjoying the company of my own imagination. For a long time, I assumed this appreciation and need for space was congruent to being comfortable with being alone.
The first time this assumption was challenged was a few weeks before I left home for college. It was an average evening; I was in my bedroom, mom and dad were finished with work and lounging around in the living room, my brother played video games in his room, the bleep bloops leaking through the walls along with my little sister’s voice reacting to his advanced game play. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing — maybe clicking around on Facebook — but I do remember that I was completely fine, in a state of homeostasis. Nothing good happening, nothing bad, nothing exciting or new or different. Just, fine.
And I remember I was fine only because, moments later, I wasn’t.
My dad knocked on my already-open door and said something to me. It was something my mom could hear from downstairs, something that made both her and my dad laugh. I laughed, too — and for whatever mysterious reason, that moment formed a crystal-clear memory I have yet to shed even the smallest detail of: my parents’ laughter, my brother’s bleep bloops, my sister’s little voice, and an overwhelming sensation exploding in my gut, a feeling that everything I’d ever known would, very soon, change forever.
The safety and security of my bedroom was no longer going to be mine. The routine I’d known for so many years was going to disappear. And, most importantly, my default people — my family, my high school boyfriend, and my best friends — were no longer going to be physically close to me. I didn’t understand it then, wouldn’t have been able to tell you I felt this way even if I tried, but this was my greatest fear: that my default people were going to be gone.
A “default person” — as I’m defining it for this essay — is someone who you hang out with a lot, who is at the top of your list to call to do something or nothing with, and these default people can take different forms depending on your stage of life. Sometimes your default people are chosen simply because of proximity; if you’re a kid in a neighborhood full of other kids, your default people might be your neighbors, or if you and a roommate are both new to a city and don’t know anyone else, perhaps you default to exploring the town with each other. Other times, your default people are such because of how they make you feel, but examples of this are far more complex; if you’re married, your default person may be — and most likely is — your spouse. But is it a healthy marriage? A co-dependent one? An abusive one? In each scenario, the labeling of the spouse as “default person” can be applied.
The dynamics between us and our default people — and the reasoning behind why we choose to spend time with them — paint a much more nuanced picture of who we are and, ultimately, how we can work to be more whole as individuals. Because who we attract and why, who we decide to spend time with and why, is only unshaped clay; acknowledging which of those relationships are healthy and which are not, and then doing the work to keep or change who we surround ourselves with and how, is the much harder work of turning that clay into something useful, something that will help us both in our relationships and outside of them.
In my case, ever since I started having romantic partners at age 16, my default people have been these romantic partners, even though I’ve been lucky enough to also have loving friends and family throughout life. The romantic partners have been the people I lean on the hardest to encourage me, to champion me, to teach me. I’ve always chosen people I can look up to, whose habits and hobbies and mindsets I can not just relate to, but usurp as my own. When this reality dawned on me near the end of my last relationship, I realized this pattern of leaning into romantic partners told me a lot about who I am: that I’m not inherently trusting of myself, that I may not, in fact, be the fully the independent person I have tried to present myself as. Understanding this core and unsettling truth was brutal, as was having to ask myself: as someone whose identity has always been so enmeshed with someone else’s in an intimate way, who was I alone?
When I broke up with my ex, this was the question I posed. I remember saying to him, I need to be alone. Those four words, so hard for both of us to hear. I longed to trust my likes and dislikes, my strengths and my flaws, without the influence of another. I knew I needed to learn to navigate life on my own before I could be the kind of romantic partner I or any other person really deserved. I didn’t want to leave him, but I had to. And the night I told him this, he understood. Because he was a person I looked up to, I knew he would.
I should have left, maybe. Started my journey to being alone then. But instead, my ex and I bought two bottles of wine and proceeded to drink them in the yard of our apartment together, an apartment we’d soon not call ours at all. He was my other half — without him, I was terrified of what I would be. Of course, I didn’t want that night, or us, to be over. It was — we were — comfortable and good.
But such homeostasis had to end. And it did.
—
I'd nearly dozed off laying there half-nude on the marble in the hammam, the cut-out stars above blurred in my half-lidded tranquility, but eventually I felt a small shake from the bath attendant who smiled and rocked her head towards one of the bathing areas. Again, she held my hand as she led me to the warm stone seat. It occurred to me then just how precious the act of handholding is; if I hadn't felt this way already in my nakedness, the handholding reverted me fully to a childlike state. And perhaps this gesture, one invoking the vulnerability of childhood, was done on purpose — a gentle precursor to the main act of being bathed, an act that is innately maternal.
Once seated, the attendant doused me with water from a wide golden bowl, over and over, until I was soaked. Then came the exfoliating. From my neck to my feet she scrubbed, and I was astonished at the rolls and rolls of dead skin peeling away — a mind-boggling amount to lose. The sudsing was my favorite, though. She soaked a long cloth in a bowl of soapy water and with a trained flick of her arms, whipped it through the air so it inflated the way a pillowcase would, or a parachute. She then collected the open end of the soap pillowcase with one hand, and with the other, wrung out the soapy water onto my body the same way you'd slide up the last bit of toothpaste from a tube. The bubbles were enormous, and near my chest and neck I felt I was wearing a light feather boa, something only a queen could wear, a thing made of rare, diaphanous silk.
The attendant did not speak. Only a few times did another nearby attendant say something in Turkish, and my attendant would giggle in a sweet and girlish way. This camaraderie, community, felt as pure and ancient as the dome above us, as the very ritual we were all currently a part of, the act of intimately caring for others. How basic and necessary it is to feel cared for, I thought, how easy to give in to the care of others. And how strange, how hard it can be to take care of ourselves, even when we know we must.
The attendant doused me one last time with her golden bowl and led me to a room where she towel-dried me, grinned her beautiful grin, and sent me on my way. Before we parted, we squeezed each other’s hands as if to say, thank you, I appreciate you, you are not alone.
Exiting the hammam, I popped my air pods back in with the intention to play music, not directions. I wanted to see if I could remember how to make it home on my own.
Compared to the tropical wetness of the hammam, the Istanbul city air was so dry. My legs felt lighter than they'd had before I'd been bathed, and I thought of my attendant spending so much time on them, exfoliating, washing, massaging, looking up to me at one point with a gaze I felt I could read like a billboard, We've walked so much, and so far. Forgive yourself for the missteps. I took notice of my legs now, felt a pull of gratitude at how they'd carried me, and where they would take me next.
I breathed in deep, smelled the intense scents of street food I passed —chestnuts, roasted corn, fresh figs ashen with sugar, clams with lemons. I thought about how I'd felt comforted by my ex’s smell for so long. Relied on it. Relied on him. It's no surprise the breakup felt like internal demolition; he wasn't just such a big part of my life. He was, still, a big part of me missing.
—
The day after the wedding, I took myself to dinner. It was my last night in Istanbul, and I decided on a four-star restaurant with magnificent city views. When I arrived and clarified I was a party of one, it was apparent the hostess was unsure what to do with me, and — to my amusement — seated me at the service bar. I was sure this was a spot meant for the wait staff to hang around on their phones in between shifts, but I didn't mind. I read a book and drank wine, slowly enjoyed a smattering of appetizers that had arrived for me on too many plates to fit on my small section of bar, forcing me to consolidate. The service bartender had found this funny and helped me clear the extra plates.
"Are you Russian, or American?" he asked me in a thick Turkish accent.
"American," I said. He smiled.
"You are so beautiful."
I returned the grin. I’m trying to be, I thought. Because even then I knew, real beauty would come with wholeness. And I knew it would be hard to achieve. What I didn't know then was that the next part of my life would be a constant battle to be whole. I did not know then that even now, eight months after my trip to Turkey, I would still struggle with not having a default romantic partner, and often find myself reaching for one with deeply engrained intuitiveness. I did not know then how intense the feelings of inadequacy and smallness that come from trying to be alone would be. I did not know then that I would fumble so often, rationalize my mistakes so defensively, or blame myself for my faults so harshly. I did not know then that I would have moments of feeling like an imposter in my own body, or a villain in my own story, all while gunning to be the hero. But then, just as I do now, I had hope.
At that restaurant, surrounded by people, I simply closed my eyes. To be among all those voices, still as an island in a cacophonous sea, was grounding. I was one being amongst all those people I would soon forget — one life among all these lives sprawling like canyons. I was alone. But I was okay.
I finished my meal, left a large tip, and exited into the summer night. I walked towards my hotel under the far-reaching stars, and at one point, locked eyes with a woman about my age, walking briskly, also alone. We smiled at each other as we crossed paths, and I wondered if she’d thought, just as I did — who is she? Where has she been? Where is she going?
Silently, lovingly, I wished both of us luck.