October 15, 2020:
Not for the last time I completely failed to grasp just how lonely I was, so that when the possibility of communication opened I grabbed at it for all the wrong reasons.
We never did communicate. I hoped for a friend, she wanted a romance. With her red couch and her red boots, she was bitter because I wasn't what she'd imagined, so that our week together in her tiny apartment was both companionless and claustrophobic.
But I knew I was lonely. It was the essence of my exile: foredoomed to loneliness evermore. I did not understand that loneliness would play me in subtle ways, for example by encouraging me to grasp after shiny promises with no real possibility of substance. Lack of insight fueled my multiple downfalls, the traumas I was condemned to relive endlessly in their obscenely obscure variations. It was only with meds and therapy I began to cotton-on.