I swung open the door this morning in a summer dress and wool socks (pictured, bottom left). It is rougly 40 degrees in my apartment but this dress was the closest decent article of clothing I could find, so I yanked it down from the closet cursing under my breath while someone kept gently knocking and we scrambled around in my cold apartment, yelling JUST A SECOND like high schoolers, caught in the act.
There were two women standing in front of me, looking surprised. I figured they knocked on the wrong door and was relieved it wasn’t my landlord coming by unannounced for some new thing. We both just said, “Oh! Um…,” at each other a few times and then the talkative one says, “Oh, we were looking for a Spanish-speaking family,” and I was like, Oh, and pointed across the hall, thinking that was how they were describing my neighbors, like they were visiting them for brunch or something.
Just as I’m about to close the door, all relieved that Henry, my landlord, isn’t about to be throwing glue traps under my stove (again), the lady pipes up,
“Oh, but we do have an English-speaking brochure about loneliness.”
“Oh, okay!” I was for some reason very happy that she had a brochure for me, that we both could feel like this wasn’t all in vain.
She reached in her messenger bag, “Here this will help with loneliness, you just read it along with your own copy of the Bible.”
I nodded and said, “Perfect!” and tried to make sure she really thought I had a Bible and that this was probably going to turn everything around for me.
I must have looked REALLY lonely.
