I am perfectly fine, as I always am; I simply wish to be alone. I always find people deeply challenging, am only comfortable by myself. The choice is thus always between discomfort and being alone. Very often over the past three years I have chosen discomfort, and I have been glad for it; this is the path to growth, at least for me. I choose challenge over complacency very gladly. But I am going through something that, I think, can only be truly gone through alone.

I find, predictably, some comfort in this. In “Another Frequency,” a story in Julia Elliott’s collection Hellions (also in Conjunctions), we follow Viv, a delivery driver who is losing connection from her life during the holiday season. She relies on music to feel deeply; we enter the story to her despair that she has lost this connection, too. Still, she delivers. She visits with her wife and son. But she is constantly tuning her radio, trying to find music that sparks something in her.

When finally she does, it drives her to isolation in the forest, at the river, to writhe naked in the earth. Through this, she moves through time. She hallucinates or perceives her wife and son in different incarnations—older, younger. She speaks with her father, who is dead, but once was not. She is going through something, and it must be gone through alone. With others, she simply cannot go through it.

She dreams of her father coming back to life from within his coffin, insisting he is fine now. I dream often like this about my mother. She is rarely fine, often visibly dying, but she insists that she is well. I wake believing she is still alive. Meanwhile, in my waking hours, I think often of my father as he was to me for a few good years between stints of addiction. A confidant, a friend, perhaps just a father. An interested party. Time is linear to me, and so I remember it—his interest, and mine—as though it is still real. I think often of things that he would like, places I should take him when next he visits. But I do not think he will visit again. I have not invited him. Very little motivates him these days that cannot be found in a bottle. In my mind he, too, is alive in his coffin, insisting he is fine.

To spoil the story: Viv realizes her erratic behaviour risks and worries her family, so she abandons her refuge in the muck. The holiday season ends; she has gone through what she has gone through. The muck will be there again. Now, the way to connect is to connect. She stows her radio in the attic and keeps her promise to herself to leave it there until, years later, leaves a scintillating dinner with friends to visit it. It is old and degraded, but it is there. It still works. It remains hers alone.

I am in my muck time. I cannot explain; I do not wish to. I must just be a little apart for now. And once I have been through it and found what grounds me, the way to connect will be to connect.