I stopped trying so hard, or other things got in the way; whatever happened, I don’t feel as connected as I used to. As things stand, I think I might be a little mad - I have one friend who I might be lucky to see once a fortnight, others who I maybe see once a month, and a family with whom I have a sometimes-strained relationship; I am, after all, leaving them with no promise of return later on this year.

Besides that, there is the Internet, which used to have a lot of promise for me. There were over two thousand people who at least pretended to be interested in what I had to say; a little landscape populated by people who wouldn’t scuttle away if I popped my head up and said hello. Then things, and people, got ugly. Complications here and there, but also some cowardice - reaching out to strangers is hard, and often ends up being an empty gesture.

It’s odd to think that I met Casey by doing this, and my fiancé, and a few other online contacts who are still dotted around. These days, I wonder if I’d have the same luck - I’m a little jaded by the number of people with whom I ended up having nothing in common (there are a few), and I suspect that might colour my initial perceptions a little more.

What it means, though, is that there is once again enough silence to really get to grips with what being alone is like. You need a lot of solitude to really get a handle on it - periods in between contact are just points of anxiety, not moods in themselves. It’s funny that I’m currently at a point with so much contact - my job requires near-constant communication with colleagues and students - but little that’s meaningful or friendly. There’s the palpable sense that I’m just ticking along.

Today, we got an email from USCIS, the US immigration office, saying that they’d received my petition to become a legal permanent resident of the United States. This means that it’ll be roughly five months before I go for a visa interview with a view to entering the country - I was waiting before, but now that waiting has an accent on it.

My fiancé is currently seeing friends in Canada, and by all accounts having a great time; it’s heartwarming to watch, but occasionally the feeling of why am I not there flares up. Being kept apart from the person that you love isn’t quite how it’s made out to be - for the first month or so, there’s that gut-wrenching movie loneliness that people assume you’re going to have, but when a year passes with no contact - and it has - it becomes a dull background ache, only fucking with you if you lean on it too hard. It’s always there, waiting to ruin your evening; the trick is finding a way to stop it from bothering you.

So. Continuing to figure out Who I Am is how I’m mostly spending my time. There is part of me that knows that I won’t have this sort of period of long, uninterrupted contemplation for a long time after I move, and I need to re-learn some of the things I worked out before university and brush off some of the more unhelpful attitudes I’ve developed in the interim.

More and more, I want to be the sort of person who’s dependable in a crisis, cool and analytical, emotional when it’s helpful but otherwise polite and reasonable. I could do with a little more drive. I want to expand my capacity for language - stagnated as it is by a years-long terror of coming across as “pretentious” - but still somehow come across as approachable rather than intimidating. I want to enjoy the company of others, but not get sucked into black holes when I’m on my own. I’m coming to terms with the fact that education and adolescence only shape you so far, recognising that this mind and body is still a work-in-progress, and figuring out the best way to work on it.