I am now alone in New York and it turns out it’s not glamorous at all

Her fiance’s visa issues have left Holly Baxter with a lot of spare time on her hands. Will she finally get round to writing that novel? Don’t bet on it

Going solo: I’m not exactly Carrie Bradshaw (Getty/iStockphoto)

I never did the whole “living alone” thing. I had the vague intention to do it — after all, I grew up in the Nineties and early Noughties when films and TV shows were saturated with images of Bridget Joneses and Carrie Bradshaws living their best lives in impossibly large city apartments on single-person salaries for jobs that seemed to only take up five hours of their week — but the economy put paid to that notion. Instead, like most people in my generation, I went from my mum’s house to student halls to packed shared houses (seven bedrooms, so long as you remember the fifth, sixth and seventh bedrooms are the living room, kitchen and balcony respectively) to a flat with my first live-in boyfriend. And then, reader, I married him. Or I tried to, but a pandemic happened and… You know the drill.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that my fiance has left the country. There’s a huge Covid-related backlog of renewal visas waiting to be handled by an American embassy which is still closed to British applications, and his is one of them. A few days ago, he had to pack up two suitcases of everything he might need for an indefinite amount of time (“Could be anywhere between a few weeks and February 2022, and you should plan for February 2022,” his immigration lawyer told him) into two suitcases – summer clothes, winter coats, in-between jackets, flip-flops, snow boots, N95 masks, a full crusader outfit with functional chain mail to wear during the England game – and leave. As he climbed into the Uber outside our Brooklyn apartment and started his journey back to the country we’d both been locked out of since December 2019, the reality hit me like a ton of bricks. The person I’d spent 23 hours a day with for 18 months would no longer be there. In October, I’ll probably have to fly back from our honeymoon alone.

‘Could be anywhere between a few weeks and February 2022, and you should plan for February 2022,’ his immigration lawyer told him

In order to cheer myself up about the idea of E being gone, I had briefly entertained ideas of taking full advantage of his absence. I would cover the flat in sticky notes about a novel that was surely gestating inside me and wake at 6am to write it. I would do mindful yoga three times a day. I would train the cat to use sign language. I would catch up with all the friends and family I’ve been unable to properly speak with during the pandemic and enrich my life with their thoughts and feelings.

But it turns out that waking up alone in the same apartment you spent weeks choosing with your fiance doesn’t really make you feel like doing yoga or writing a novel. It makes you feel like crap. You wake up at 2am because there’s a thunderstorm, then you wake up at three-thirty because someone’s setting off fireworks from the roof again, then you wake up at five because your fiance is on a different time zone now so you may as well speak to him. You turn on British radio stations just to drown out the silence when you crawl out of bed at eight. You overfeed the cat so he doesn’t chew your ears off and traumatise the parents who have to identify your body if you die in your sleep of a previously undiagnosed heart condition. You look up “meals for one” and do sad grocery store orders. You check the cupboards three times before going to bed, in case an errant murderer snuck in while you were brushing your teeth and is waiting for the chance to murder you in your sleep. And, of course, your smoke alarm starts going in the middle of the night on the very first night your fiance is away, because that’s how life goes.

Even better, your parents and siblings now call you every minute of every day because they vaguely suspect you might jump off a bridge or lose your mind. Mostly, they moan about each other. And maybe you are in danger of losing your mind. You start crying in the shower. You crack a molar grinding your teeth in the night. Your stomach ulcer pills glare down at you from their perch on the kitchen counter, nestled up against a forlorn bottle of champagne that awaits your fiance’s return.

And you are not a war widow or a refugee. You are a whiny white woman who works in the media and lives in New York City. Break out the tiny violins. Yet you are also in a strange country, during an ongoing pandemic, with a three-times-postponed wedding supposedly coming up in three months and a fiance who now lives overseas, and, to top it all off, football is not coming home.

All of which is to say: could you just open the embassy up again, President Biden? There’s only so long I can pretend I’m on the cusp of writing that damn novel.