“Sometimes it grieves me that I have never loved anyone. I don’t think I’ve ever been loved either.”

But sometimes it’s a relief. The beloved slipping away, through the sheets and off the bed as if in faint, eyes rolling back into his head as they do in syncopal episode or when, say, listening with real attention to the ideas of another, that other’s ideas always inadequate to him, boring to him, never stunning. Of course it begs the question. You know the one, appearing after months of saying not-a-significant-word to each other, appearing in the nighttime maw of your bedroom, the room’s mouth looming like the mouth of the leviathan, typhlotic inside and full of god-knows-what. Luckily, having never been seen releases you of your responsibility to see anything in particular. This is what you tell yourself, at least. Remembering your childhood, so submerged in that drool of orthodoxy spit upon you, everyone wanting you to be pretty and hating you for failing to do so, everyone expecting, every minute, you’ll learn how to be, but—thinking of your childhood you are released of all downward pressures, fluid or otherwise, like a plug being pulled out of a tub. They say you can drown in even the shallowest water, can drown in even just the water you produce yourself, the stakes always higher than anyone wants to let you in on. Released from the responsibility of seeing others, you can spend some time trying to see yourself, if you can find whatever’s down in there, if anything. They say that clichéd thing, you know the one (“you can’t love anyone else until…”) but honestly you’re not even working on that. Instead, you’re just reveling in this moment. This moment, in which you submerge again, but this time in supreme laziness. This moment, in which you don’t feel you have to do anything at all.