Sensuous

14 February — Sunday

Hello.

Hello, Smith-Corona Electra 110.

I didn’t throw all this shit away in the morning. In the morning I got up and made myself instant coffee. I went out and bought the Times and lugged it all home and read most of it. I did most of the crossword puzzle. There was no Double-Crostic. Just a pair of diagramless puzzles. I’ve never understood how one does them. I’ve a feeling no one in the world really knows how.

Then what did I do? Went out for a walk. Had beef lo mein at a Cuban Chinese restaurant on Eighth Avenue. Walked some more. Came back. Played the radio. Let disc jockeys talk to me. Didn’t talk back. Didn’t even listen.

It is now somewhere past nine o’clock in the evening of my first full day in my new apartment. So far today I have spoken perhaps ten words to the waiter in the restaurant, all of those words having to do with my dish of beef lo mein and my eventual desire for the check. I did not have to say anything to the news dealer. I picked up the Times, handed him a dollar, took my change. He may have thanked me. I don’t remember.

If I were to get up from the typewriter right now and cut my wrists, no one would know until the smell of my rotting corpse scurried under the door. They might miss me at the office — and they might not miss me at all — but they do not know that I have moved, and I left no forwarding address in Brooklyn.

There is a phone. I don’t know why I had them put it in. No one will call me, and I shall call no one. But there is indeed a phone. Its number is unlisted. No one could get my number from the telephone company. They take this trust as seriously as the Swiss take numbered accounts.

I pay extra for my unlisted number. Why? Who would want to call me? And what makes me so anxious not to be called?

Not that I would ever cut my wrists, or otherwise put an end to myself. It cheers me to realize that I have never found suicide attractive. It has no charm for me. Death would be even more boring than the life I lead. And would last longer.

I fell less depressed than these words would suggest. I feel oddly elated and cannot entirely understand why. There is a sense of liberation in this total solitude. There is a sense of liberation in being alone in a new place with no ties whatsoever to the past. A new living situation suggests the possibility of a new life.

Yes. Thus the elation.

I feel — how to explain it? I feel that I am en route to something. That I am about to grow. That the bud of me is swelling and preparing to flower.

I thought of something wonderful to do. Go out and buy a dozen valentines. Send them, unsigned and with no return address, to a dozen strangers selected at random from the Manhattan telephone directory. Or sign each with the name of one of the others, and put on the appropriate return address.

Too late now. Next year, perhaps.