Armed with a black sketchbook whose spine was always cracked, a variety of writing utensils, and barely enough money for coffee, I’d find a table or a chair tucked in a corner where I could disappear. With my boots sloughing the rain off into a pool beneath me, and the sad drips from my bangs smudging the ink in my pseudo-diary, I sat and sipped and sulked. Mostly I sulked.

I was lonely when I was alone and somehow I was even lonelier when I was with someone else, and I did a horrific job of hiding my perpetual discomfort and disappointment, and as I wallowed in all of the ways I was sure I had gone wrong, and all of the ways I was sure I had been wronged, I made sure that whoever I was with felt helpless and shitty too. What else could they possibly do to make me happy? What could they possibly have done to make me so sad? When I think about it now it makes me vaguely nauseous knowing just how self-centered and pathetic I was; that any morning I could have woken up and decided that things were going to change, and like that, they could have changed. Needless to say, I didn’t have any sunrise revelations, but I’ll be damned if things didn’t change anyway, they just changed without me.