She had told me that she'd never been lonely; a fact that she stated with some degree of lamentation. I had wanted to find this for her-- search back with her to a place and time in her life where she had felt this-- partly because she seemed to want it, and partly because I wanted her to be someone who had had this experience: someone more complete. It did not occur to me until years later that she had never felt lonely for the simple reason that she had never been alone. She had hopped from one relationship to the next, filling the spaces in between with flings. She pretended to covet her space, within this life of clinging to others, she often pushed away. She lamented that lack of time at home alone, the constant intrusion on her space, but even the times she claimed she was taking out for herself-- vacations alone, a few days with the house to herself-- she would find someone else to fill the vacancy, at least part time, in her bed.

She had never known the feeling of really being alone, of waling up morning after morning for months on end with no one in the bed but you, no one to talk to while you shuffle numbly through the apartment in your morning routine. Lonely showers, quick and efficient; meals eaten at work; deafening silences; solitude lasting long enough to bring you through sexual frustration to periods of deep longing just to be held, where your solitude is enough to make even masturbation too desperate and tiresome to contemplate.

It's this type of loneliness I've been battling off lately, where the rented movies containing plot twists of defeat and depression must go unwatched and the mere hint of heartbreak and cheating in a book I'd been previously enjoying cause me to put it down, dress hurriedly and walk down to my favorite restaurant for a small meal surrounded, at least, by others, choosing in my head the route whose roads are least shadowed and sad to spare my mood even this small, additional burden.

It this because of stress. Is it because I don't have anyone? Is it the psychic drain of the wildfires that seems to have this entire town groggy and hard to engage? Perhaps it is the ache in my hand from too much time at the computer and the resulting reduction in workout time that this, combined with the poor air quality here has forced upon me. I certainly don't want to entertain the possibility that it is because she has, however marginally, crept back into my life and seems, through the magic lens of the internet anyway, to be settling down and making roots with someone, where I have failed. I'm not jealous that she's not mine-- jesuschristgodno-- just that she seems to have done everything wrong and still ended up with more than me.

Then again she is a liar, and at least I don't have to live with that. Maybe things are OK after all.