The Model of the Lone Woman (A Mini Read)
I’d booked a table for dinner at 7pm, ludicrously early by Portuguese standards, and maybe that was part of it – knowing I was just a table for one and not wanting to take up the prime dinner tables later on in the evening. At this time there were fewer fellow diners to watch, and so I pulled out a book while I waited for my food.
A father and daughter arrived. At first I assumed they were American, because it was early, because most people I’d come across were and because the dad looked a bit like Bill Gates. But when I tuned in to their conversation frequency they were speaking a Germanic-sounding language. I glanced up from my book and noticed the girl looking at me.
I guessed she was about fifteen, something I questioned when she later gained a glass of wine but there was no way she was any older than sixteen. Her skin was too smooth, hair too unprocessed, her features just about to stop being babyish. She didn’t look down at her plate quick enough and I caught her direct gaze.
I stepped outside of my body, wandered over and sat in her seat, looking over at what she must be seeing out of her eyes. A lone woman, comfortable in her own company and seemingly unapologetic about taking up her space. Wearing a nice dress, sipping a cocktail, leaned forward attentively over a book. I felt, sitting there, calm, authoritative, easeful, and I’d like to think that that came over in my demeanour – an undeniable self-assuredness.
She probably wanted to be me, or rather, her version of me. She longed to be here not with her dad, but as a sophisticated woman dining alone quite happily, with no one but herself to answer to. In that brief look across the tables it was there: the longing.
I am projecting somewhat, of course, because god didn’t I feel like fifteen years ago?! On holidays with my parents not exactly wishing to not be with them, but wishing to be a grown up, to be independent, to be doing these things under my own steam. I longed for the freedom to sit at a bar with a cocktail, to mysteriously scribble in a notebook, to sit within an aura of composure. That is how I knew how she felt: I recognised that look, the clocking of something deeply longed for.
This two second moment was a reminder of two things. One, that I have reached the age and self in which, whether I pitch myself as one or not, I am a model now to new generations of women-to-be. That teenage girls, eagerly casting around for evidence of what they can be, will land on me as a categorical grown up and evaluate what my existence means for their possibilities. There is a responsibility with that (especially as someone who is often conspicuous by being alone in unusual places) to not shrink when it feels comfortable to do so and to stand behind my life.
The second reminder was “look”. Look at where you are, look at where you have found yourself. Look at how you have become what you dreamed of without even remembering you dreamt it. Look how easily you wear the cocktail-holding, notebook-scribbling, confident persona you once looked at as a tantalising “someday maybe”; look how you are that without really trying. Because, more than anyone else, I am a model to myself.
