Two days is not a long time to be alone.
I knew this intellectually. I had spent plenty of time alone before this: late nights in empty offices, weekends absorbed in code with the phone on silent, the particular solitude of someone who had prioritized a project over the people who wanted access to the person behind it. I was familiar with alone.
This was different.
The difference was that every previous version of alone had existed inside a world full of people I could have called if I had wanted to. Sarah's number would have been in my phone. Marcus would have picked up on the second ring. Even the strangers on the street outside the office had been real, had been moving through their own lives, had been evidence that the world contained more than just me and whatever I was focused on.
