Sometimes, she thought she didn’t know what he felt because he didn’t know. Sometimes she thought he was horribly unable to explain it to her. But other times she thought she was the one inept at putting two and two together for herself, let alone putting together things that were complex and foreign to her. Things outside herself. She worried she was unable to infer anything, to puzzle anything out.

Then she thought: She didn’t even know how she felt. How could she know him?

She hadn’t realized yet that she had a tendency to talk into the spaces where someone else might speak, spaces in which they may tell her something, maybe what she didn’t want to hear. How she filled things out so that she could continue along as she wished.

So, she didn’t wonder, for instance, if perhaps it wasn’t the silence that left her lonely, but her own sound. If perhaps it was her own voice that fenced her in, alone, without him.