I used to wonder if I was just making excuses for being lonely. Then I went to a mall again. Nothing I had ever said in my life had been an excuse. The tightrope walk of being human, for me, made other people en masse seem like an impish kid banging a gong while wearing headphones and also kicking at his parents as they tried to grab his seventh Go-GURT out of his slippery hands.

My memories of growing up in Brooklyn Heights usually look like Fall in my head. Brown, yellow, and orange hues, before the yellow moved to the snow on the sidewalks, thanks to all of our dogs, for the entire winter. The apartment buildings were the backdrop to nature’s attempt to integrate with the city.

I once took a full-semester class in college called Women and Crack Cocaine. There was a book by the same name that we read. It was incredible because it was so nuanced. The semester before I took a class called Deviance. I loved my second college and my advisor, Al, who taught both of these classes. I went from failing business college to straight A grades because of the freedom of choice. You’d be surprised what students can accomplish when you open up the bandwidth on their educational opportunities.

I have a small action figure in my office that I played with every day as a kid. I think it was from an emergency show, but if so, I don’t know why he looks like a redheaded lumberjack. Either way, he carries my childhood inside of him like a guy the size of Paul Bunyan who goes home to take care of a baby rabbit with a tiny milk bottle, and covers it in a fleece he cut to cuddle it.

When I was in my first semester as a freshman in college, my mom was dying of cancer, and I had mono. I slept seventeen hours a day and could barely wake myself up to watch Stealing Home and eat before falling back asleep. I started college by almost failing all of my classes and sitting on the baseline of the basketball court so that the other guys on the team thought I was some sort of team assistant. In my first healthy practice, I drained seven threes in a row in the first five minutes. Then I kept flunking most of my classes and floundered through two depressing years. No one even knew she was sick.

My grandmother has to use a magnifying glass to see things as she got older. For some reason, I didn’t put that together with her ability to drive a car and see well while doing it. She ended up getting into a car accident that she never really recovered from. I’m sure the lung cancer didn’t help. I crashed my car the night before I left for her funeral. I wasn’t sick, and I could see fine.

In elementary school, we used to have to walk from school to Cadman Plaza Park to have gym outside. Sometimes, we had lunch or recess out there. There were always two hot dog vendors with their carts. They were in direct competition for all business, but especially for our tweenage duckets we had tucked into our corduroys. One day, they got in a fight. An actual fist fight. One was a man and the other a lady. The man stabbed the lady with his hot dog tongs. We were all shook. We left hungry.

We once had 34 empty plastic cups, formerly full of Tom Collinses, on our table at the East End Comedy Club in East Hampton while we were in the front row to see Andrew “Dice” Clay. I was woefully underage, with a fake Swedish bus pass for ID, and hoping that, whatever form of God there was, he would not go on a rant about my pimples. Bada-bing!

My daughter used to sleep in the pillow of my Vizsla’s stomach and suck her thumb and twirl her hair. Parenting is incredible. You walk around lonely until you create someone who is part of you. You will never feel lonely in the same way again. Then you get a divorce, and you only get half the days, and your old loneliness now seems like a distant star in a universe of despair.

I grew up watching wrestling and reading wrestling magazines. I thought it was real. I learned Santa Claus was a myth before wrestling. Even when I knew it was staged, it was still real to me until I sat in the front row at the L.A. Sports Arena. I could hear them talking to each other. We were that close. It punched me from the inside. We ended up getting kicked out because my friend, Keebs, spat on Billy Jack Haynes back when he was out of the ring. I didn’t care. The curtain was raised, and I was standing there looking at a blank screen.

I played games of human Frogger in New York City growing up, dodging yellow cabs and bike messengers with the deftness of an experienced breakdancer about to pop-n-lock their way out of a traffic ticket. I felt so independent as a child, able to walk freely into the world and come home with a candy bar to assuage my loneliness.

My mom used to make me breakfast in bed every morning when I was a tween and a teen. Occasionally, she would have to go to work early and would tell me the night before that I needed to make my own breakfast. Sometimes, it bothered me. She was working all the time and had cancer, and I was miffed because I wasn’t getting maple and brown sugar oatmeal in bed with orange juice. Brat.

Open political discourse has reached an abominable level. Actually, it’s been here for years. It looks like a thermometer that goes up to 100 degrees when it’s 112 in the shade in Scottsdale. Bursting at the seams. I stopped talking about politics and religion with people long ago, but not because I don’t like an intelligent back-and-forth conversation. It’s because people don’t like to play educational ping pong anymore. They like the buy that half-table that exists so they can hit the ball back and forth to themselves for hours while their like-minded friends watch on Twitch.

The kids all looked so excited this morning. Maybe it’s because they know that no teacher will assign homework on the first day. Maybe it’s because they want to show off their new kicks. Maybe they are just happy to be out of their parents’ reach for a change. School is a form of freedom, but also a very tight restriction. Having to ask to use the bathroom makes you feel powerless.

My whole life is a never-ending to-do list of things I don’t actually have to do. Maybe everything is aspirational at this age. Some might call it delusional. I want to be more like my cats. They seem to be free of appointments and genuinely happy relaxing until the end of time. Maybe I should also take breaks to chase bugs and pat tiny balls around on the ground with my off hand.

I used to like going to sleep in mom’s bed when I woke up in the middle of the night. When my stepdad moved in with us, it was more awkward. So, a lot of the time, I would go into their room and sleep on the floor with my two dogs, Bert and Ernie. I felt lonely and wonderful at the same time.

A long time ago, I made the decision to stop pulling at strings that never end. When someone doesn’t want to answer, that is that. I am no longer in the business of investigation and would much rather spend my time shuffling my fantasy football roster at the last second on a late Sunday morning than trying to drill into steel to get a dixie cup of lukewarm water.

One time when I stopped taking Lexapro cold turkey while going through a divorce, I lost space and time. My body was sweating, and my mind was lucid dreaming while I sat in the living room trying to watch TV. It was as close to an alternative universe as I have ever been. I knew then that those drugs were not helping me. Sometimes you are just sad because you can’t see your kids every day and your life has lost so much meaning.

Sometimes, it’s the subtle things that make us see the writing on the wall. Sometimes, we wear blinders so thick that the first line of the eye chart seems blurry to us. Sorry, Doc, I can’t make that out because it’s not something I want to see right now. I never liked wearing glasses.

No one says, “Hey honey, I’m house.” Home is a state of mind. It was hard for anything to feel like home to me with my mom gone. Looking back, the difference between a house and a home, to me, was family. When I had my own family, I could’ve lived in a shack and still felt at home. Curated decorations help, but I still feel lonely when they are the only things to welcome me home.