It is only in the rarest degrees of loneliness, the once and a while of sinister opportunities, that you recognize a desperation in yourself so pathetic, so powerful. This hunger for intimacy is either true in itself or in the coincidental closeness of sex. You’ll keep yourself awake in your bed, that very bed that has never before born the burden of another’s weight but your own; you’ll stare deep into the stem of your lamp, into the spine of some innocuous reading material, into the darkened parts of your room. You’ll twiddle your thumbs, feel your hands. There will be a buffer that keeps thoughts from your mind, one that allows you the luxury of numbing silence and, eventually, drugged, peaceful sleep. You will wrap your hands up and over, around themselves. You will touch them to your face every now and then, not, as some would believe, to relive the contact of a stranger, but if only to check and see if it’s still there.

I wrote a letter to myself once. It didn’t have too much to do with you. I think your name may have come up once. My self wasn’t really focused on you, or anything about you. My self had bigger fish to fry. My self wanted to know what my fucking problem was. I think those were the words she used. What was my fucking problem, anyway?

This state of vacation from myself, from my personality, from everything about me that allowed others to know me may have done some permanent damage. I may have put some things away that I can’t quite bring back. I may have put the dearest parts of myself to sleep. This is why this letter probably had nothing to do with you. I was falling apart, and in relation to this whole situation, you and all of your ilk were quite inconsequential.

I mean, I’m sorry for the way that this sounds, but it’s true. I don’t know any other way to explain it, but you had nothing to do with this. I put away anything I felt for you, and thus I took away any ability you had to affect me in the first place. There was nothing you could have done about it.

My parents keep trying to call me. I should be sick about what I’m doing to them. This is what they were afraid of. That I would move away and they’d never hear from me again. No no no, I said. Why would I ever do that, I said. You still hear from all the boys, I said. It’s different, they said. You’re different, they said. You don’t like us, they said. That’s not true, I said. What was I getting at? Before any of this happened, I was that person. I was the one who would have phoned mom and pop every week, reassured them of my health, my career, and so on. Now I just…I just don’t want to have to reassure anyone of anything. Not even myself. I want to pass from day to day with no expectations, no hopes, no fears. And look. I got what I wanted.

So, back to you.

Remember when you would always make fun of the brick walls at my place? You would say that brick walls were for factories, that a place made of bricks was no place to live. But here I am. And these walls never stopped you from spending the night here more times than I could count. And I liked that. I remember joking that you loved me and not the walls; you were coming to go to bed with me and not those bare bricks. But then you stopped coming. And now these walls say more about me than I can say about me.

I feel like at this point, you might expect me to say something dramatic, like “What have I become?” But I am aware of what I have become.

I have become someone independent of other people. I have become someone capable of withstanding the isolation of deep space. I held a pillow over my face a long time ago, and I stopped moving. My daily routine is the same, more or less. Work, home.

Nowhere in that routine is there room for anyone else. Not my parents and not you.

I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I can’t apologize, either.