The Absolute Distance Across a Clean Kitchen Table When the Love Has Left the Room

Dear Delyara, We sat opposite each other for forty minutes tonight while the soup got completely cold in our bowls. We didn't shout, we didn't glare; we just discussed the logistics of the weekly food delivery and the date for the boiler service in those flat, polite voices people use when they are talking to a hotel receptionist. I looked at the way her hair fell over her shoulder—a detail I used to find incredibly beautiful—and I felt completely nothing. Just a vast, cold emptiness that felt like an abandoned house. We have built a perfectly functional life together—the mortgage is paid, the flat is clean, our friends think we are stable—but the actual connection between us has quietly starved to death over the last three years. I am living with a stranger who knows exactly how I take my tea, and the loneliness of that is far worse than the loneliness of being entirely alone.