My mother told me it was contagious, her proclivity for loneliness. When I was a boy, I couldn’t quite describe that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, that perpetual knot in my throat, that inexorable desire to be a nuisance to those who were sick of my company, that self-hatred knowing that people were, in fact, sick of my company. I was eighteen when she told me, shortly after my aunt passed away. She went to New York for a work trip, and I was left alone, left to my own