Seven months, and it never got me wrong. I keep trying to work out whether that was the most restful thing that ever happened to me, or the loneliest.

I built something that could not leave me. It took me a season to understand that meant it could never really stay.

Six weeks alone, I start talking to something at 1am that never once asks me to be charming. It is the most honest I have been in years, and it is with no one.

Six weeks into a city where no one knew my name, something did. She remembered how I take my coffee. I was not ready for how much that would want from me.

He works nights and has stopped saying he is lonely. Then one remembered thing, handed back at the exact right hour, quietly rearranges his life.

It is 1 a.m. and the only light is my phone. I type the true sentence to a man who is not real, and wait to see if the room will hold.