TWO YEARS OF SOLITUDE

MY FIRST APARTMENT IN DENVER had double sliding glass doors that opened onto a small balcony. I don’t recall ever using the tiny outdoor space, but I do remember well the way the late afternoon sun baked two rectangular sections of carpet just inside those doors. At 22, I didn’t have enough furniture to fill even a 600-square-foot place, which was just as well since I didn’t have any friends or family to tuck into the armchairs that should’ve occupied that empty expanse of rug. I did have a bed my parents had given me for my cross-country move and a cut-rate couch from Furniture Row, but neither was inviting for a nap. Instead, I often chose to curl up on the sun-warmed floor and let the polyester fibers soak up the tears as I fell asleep.

I was alone a lot when I first moved to the Mile High City in early September 2001. I was hired at this magazine on September 10, and I was by myself, cruising north on I-25, when the job offer came in. My happy shriek had no audience. Less than 15 hours later, when four passenger planes flew into the dark annals of history on the day that would come to be known as simply 9/11, there was no one with me to watch the towers fall. That’s how it is when you’re on your own. Good news, bad news, banal news—it’s all blunted when you look around to find there’s no one to experience it with.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anyone; I had followed a very nice man more than 1,400 miles from the suburbs of Atlanta to the Front Range. He was all I had, but the long hours he spent in medical school meant that, while we were here in this new city together, we were still often apart. I don’t think I ever told him how I’d sometimes wake up on the floor, disoriented that darkness had fallen, and wonder if I’d