Loneliness

It was a great way to lose weight. For me, it was cheese sandwiches without mustard in an empty kitchen at sunrise. It was cigarette breath and going three days without hearing my own voice, so when it came out it was cracked and dry as the skin of an old woman’s hand. Loneliness was your name in the morning, and crying into the mirror. Tap water and pornography.

It was so many things. The telephone you never called. Loneliness was e-mail. Eventually it became the internet in general, cell phone towers, the waves they emit that penetrate everything, everywhere, all the time.

Sleep was what I had. But even in sleep was the knowledge that if I slept for a hundred years I would still wake up choking on your absence. It’s not time that heals—it is suffering.