What surprised me wasn’t what he had said, or how unequivocally he had said it, but the self-assurance with which he had shared this detail about himself. I wondered at the kind of confidence or its opposite that one must possess to be comfortable and, evidently, a little proud of a fear of silence.

It’s when I come up most strongly against the architectures of violence that structure my life that I fall back most gratefully on a lifelong desire for solitude. Those moments are increasingly rare these days. What has taken over my life instead is an ever-growing thrum of everyday noise. It has become easy, with all that noise to keep one company, to shrink back a bit from the thought of aloneness.

But every so often I am shocked back into a clarifying hunger for stillness, for quiet, for an internally-generated reserve. It feels a bit like a superpower, something so anonymous and so seemingly foreign to that world crushes in. It feels like the exertion of a power, the careful and considered and wilful demarcation of a border, a limit, a resolve. It is my favourite rebellion, sometimes laced a little with guilt. What could be more decadent.

Other kinds of flaws and every other gender, sure. But if literature is meant to be break from or to illuminate the every day, why spend my time immersed in the most mundane and the most pervasive and the most stifling of all my daily tribulations.