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Did I ever have a social life? If I did, I miss it: being around people who liked being around you; the camaraderie and brotherhood, the solidarity that allowed you to forget even for a short period of time that I am of this world.

There are other things to miss: my personal space and my personal life. Writing in that space and time, reading a book I really wanted to read, commanding time in this universe as though I were my own god.

Virginia Woolf, my favorite writer, writes: "Only the writer with independent means can have independent views."

And I wonder if I have truly independent means to be my own self as everything I am seems to be connected to some wayward institution I really don't care much for.

I also miss friends. Especially the ones I've lost and the ones I've left behind. It kills me to think that I can't be with a lot of them but we all have other lives now. Other lives that may amount to nothing in this magnanimous universe.

I look back to the last few years and I am amazed at how far I've gone and how far I have gone despite being in the same place throughout. I miss myself a lot, and I feel I will never be whole.