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