I watched it do more damage than any disease on that floor.

I watched people with perfectly manageable conditions decline anyway, fold in on themselves, stop eating, stop talking, stop wanting — not because their bodies were failing faster than the others’ but because no one was coming, and a human being who is certain that no one is coming loses, over time, the will to keep being a person.

Loneliness is not sad.

That is what I had gotten wrong, at twenty-four.