Falling over is rubbish, but also, okay.

For three months, I lived on my own, without the internet. I don’t know why the internet part matters too much actually. But I guess it made me more alone. I wasn’t sitting chatting to people on facebook all day.

I really enjoyed living on my own. I enjoyed that I could wander around without any clothes on and not worry about running into a dismayed flatmate. I enjoyed that I could cook and eat pretty much anything I wanted. I enjoyed that I could get up when I liked, and go to sleep when I liked, and sing the theme tune to Game of Thrones really loud, and wrong, each time I put a new episode on.

And I enjoyed that I was actually liking it. I enjoyed that it wasn’t lonely or boring or driving me slowly crazy. I had a lot of house guests, which probably mixed it up just enough to stop me going out of my mind. And I saw people a lot. But all my fears about being miserable without housemates, or musings about how living with someone provides something social… well, I was wrong. I can live alone. I like living alone, and that is very liberating. Knowing I could do that.

99% of the time.

The 1%

So, one day, a normal October day, back when it was still brilliantly sunny, I put pretty much half of my entire wardrobe in the washing machine (I didn’t overload it, I just didn’t have many clothes because of the whole emigration/poverty thing). And when it came time to remove them the door wouldn’t open, the water wouldn’t drain, and half my clothes were completely stuck. I kept washing them every other day while I figured out what to do, and in the end my landlord suggested I manually drain the machine.

I turned the first knob I found, and a gush of water escaped onto my kitchen floor. I quickly shut it off and realised draining the machine would have to wait until a more appropriate hour, when I wasn’t in the middle of painting my face for a Halloween party. (And before you do the maths… from ‘brilliantly sunny’ to Halloween is about two weeks. Meh.)

Upon my return from the party, slightly inebriated, I discovered that there was, well, at a guess, about half a centimetre of water all over my kitchen floor. I grabbed the first thing I could plausibly use – a blanket which the cat slept on, and once it was saturated with water I took it to the only place I could drain it, the shower.

Apparently when most of the buildings in East Berlin were created/ built/ divided into flats or something similar, there were communal bathrooms, because that was more communist, and all the better to spy on you with. (I am not a historian, in case you were wondering.) And so when, er, human rights were restored, tiny little bathrooms were installed in apartments which had no room for them. Mine was especially small. Like a toilet cubicle, but instead of a back wall, it had a raised shower. It was pretty dangerous as it was more than a regular step up, and a wet slip* away from crashing into the toilet. I worked on an excellent shower-dismount technique during my tenancy, and managed to perfect it so that I didn’t flush the toilet everytime I finished washing.

But of course, this isn’t a random shower-logistics tangent which I’ve thrown in to spice things up. As you may have predicted, on this night, the potential hazard was realised…

The blanket, of course, dripped washing machine water all over the bathroom, and as I dumped it in the shower, ready to wring it out, I slipped, my legs gave way, and my chin smashed down onto the raised platform of the shower and started bleeding.

This was a few months ago, I grant you. But my thought process went something like this: ‘Wow! That was pretty hard! Right… must check in the mirror. Oh, that’s quite a lot of blood. Right, if I just wash it off I’ll be okay. The kitchen is mainly clean now. I might text a couple of people just to let them know I have injured myself.’

It’s probably worth noting I text Max and Kryspin, among others. Max, who I was somewhat enamoured with at the time.

‘Okay. All cleaned up, the cut isn’t as big as I thought it might be, but it certainly needs something. I wonder if I have any plasters which might be big enough? Or maybe some sort of cream? My head hurts a lot. Anyway, I think it’s all under control. Oooh, a message from Max which reads ‘Hope the washing machine isn’t too badly damaged’.

Now at this point the stage directions might read something like ‘Exit rationality. Enter profuse sobbing.’

‘OH. MY. GOD. I live on my own and I am a single woman and no one is there for me in the middle of the night. I could have passed out from the knock to my head and laid there until someone found me or the cat slowly ate me. I would have been naked and bleeding and alone and the last thing of any importance I would have done with my life is won a game of scrabble. I am so alone.’

I’m not going to lie to you. I think that at this point I actually started saying some of this stuff out loud. Or more accurately crying some of this stuff out very loud. I was in pain, and in shock, and there was blood, and I was injured. But mainly I was just a bit petrified of being all alone. Forever.

I’m still not sure I like the idea of living with someone, especially in that sharing your room and your bed way. But for that 1%, for that little half hour meltdown, I would happily have been married and living in suburbia. Probably. I wouldn’t have felt so vulnerable.

It was just an intense moment. And in intense moments you want to be able to look behind you and see someone has your back. As it happened, once Max realised the actual issue, he did offer to let me crash on his couch that night. And Kryspin, for his sins, basically listened to the most irrational crying for twenty minutes while I tried to explain what had happened and what my plan of action would be. He and Jason both offered to come from where they were to check I was okay. So there were people, people who would be there for me if I needed them. But I guess there is a point, for everyone (yeah, I’ll say it, everyone) where you want people around, and where living alone is scary, and where we’re vulnerable. At that point I always thought there were two options. Decide you really need to live with people, be around people, and that you can’t possibly cope as a single person, or completely ignore that it happened and repaint everything as simple, easy-going life in Berlin.

However, I would like to choose option three. Sometimes, something happens and exposes the flaws in what you thought was a perfect situation, like rain on your make up. There are no perfect situations. Seeing what is wrong with a situation doesn’t make that situation implicitly wrong, Helen. Maybe I will live alone again. I’ll probably enjoy it, and sometimes feel a little vulnerable and do a cry. That’s liberating too, in it’s own way.

*this is not a euphemism