Dear Diary,
I didn’t sleep well last night. I mean, it’s been a long time since I slept well, but I really didn’t sleep well. First night in a new place, and the irony. Ugh. I like using the forest sounds on my white noise machine, so I thought I’d try just listening to the forest, but that didn’t work, so I plugged in the machine, but then I had to keep turning it up louder to drown out the real forest, and that got me worried I wouldn’t hear a bear coming up to the cabin and trying to eat me, so I had to dial it down again.
The sun was up at 6, so I figured I might as well be, too. The schedule in the binder says Lydia doesn’t start hot breakfast until 8, but anything in the fridge or on the table is up for grabs, so I headed over to the lodge. Jonathan was behind the desk, but I just nodded at him and went on into the dining room to see what was up.
It’s weird, right? You’re not making or even buying your own food. I filled out page after page of things I like and things I don’t like, things I eat daily or a couple times a week or only occasionally, and there’s coffee and granola bars in my kitchenette but for the rest of it I have to walk to the lodge. Not that it’s far. None of the cabins are far. I’m the middle cabin to the right, when you’re looking at the lake, and it wouldn’t be a hard walk in the middle of the night or anything, but I ended up bringing some things back for my little fridge all the same.
It’s nowhere near the fridge case they have there in the dining room, with milk and juice and yogurt and cheese and lunch meat and stuff there for the taking, though. I could go in and look for my favorite yogurt and grab an apple from the fresh fruit, and there’s a Keurig, so I took my little breakfast to a table by the window and ate it and zoned out for a bit. If anyone called me on it I could’ve pretended I was taking in nature, I guess, but that wasn’t it. I just drifted again.
I’m not supposed to get mad at myself for wasting time like that. I’m supposed to remind myself that that’s a very capitalist mindset, and I’m working through a lot of trauma, and progress isn’t linear, and all the rest. But nobody called me on it, and the reason I came out of it was because someone walked up onto that long back porch (or maybe it’s a front porch) to sit on one of the rocking chairs and start knitting.
Henry. Hot blond dude with the broad shoulders and chiseled jaw and sensual lips. That guy knits. If it were one of the other women, I would’ve gone out there and started a conversation. Asked about her knitting and how she learned. But when a guy knits … when a guy who looks like that knits … his entire point is getting you to ask. He has his answer prepared, and you’re supposed to ooh and ahh over whatever he makes, even if his tension’s off and he hasn’t used anything but Red Heart.
Stop it, Agatha. You can insult Henry without being a yarn snob.
My feelings are valid. I can’t just get out my own knitting and sit there and knit next to him, because of all the stereotypes and my worry that he’ll get all offended because he’s not special.
Look at how beautifully I worded that: my worry that. Not the assumption that he would in fact act that way.
Diary, I did not give him the chance to prove me wrong. I picked up my garbage, threw that away, and picked one of the reusable bags that were in a neat stack on the corner of the serving table so I could take some more food back to my cabin.
I was late enough that Alyssa was behind the desk. She caught sight of me and laid her book down flat, but I recognized the cover, because there’s a whole shelf of those in the lodge’s library: an Agatha Christie. I don’t know which one, because they all look alike, but that’s what it was. And I had to sidestep Jane on my way out, so I think she saw how I was looking at Alyssa, because she seemed startled.
I sat on my own porch for a while with my own knitting until I got cold, and then I came back in here and made some more coffee and wrapped a blanket around my legs and wrote all this. But now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my day, because I agreed to come to a place with so few distractions. Joy. Maybe I’ll go try to drown myself in the lake.
Cold Comfort: Tuesday, July 2, 2024 – Alyssa, coming July 6
Rebecca Frost 
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