Friday . . . Valentine’s Day is over with and now simply a memory–not even a memory, just another x’ed out day on the calendar.

More and more I’ve been missing the connections with other people, the connections I’ve never been successful at making. The connections I don’t want to make. The connections I must make if I don’t want to be so damned lonely. The connections Hanna-Marie used to make for ‘us’. That ability to make connections is probably a part, surely is a part of the female psyche.

Not that she instantly engineers deep and meaningful relationships, but at least she has acquaintances. And now, with the international nature of her employment, she has developed acquaintances all over the world.

While Dr.Malamud sits alone and facing a thin white drywall barrier between my apartment and the next, decorated with a calendar, a wall clock, and a caricature from happier times, all held firm by hourglass-shaped pushpins. There he pounds on his POS Dell laptop that’s been rewarded more frequent flier miles (for warranty work) than he’s scored in the past ten years.

Not to be mean, but instead to be truthful, the majority of my fellow workers are more victims of my secret, and usually disdainful scrutiny, than being under consideration as possible acquaintances. With their I.Q.s in the double digits and their vacant ambitions they would simply either fuel my depressions or make me feel like a god.

Again I’m at my far north Phoenix Starbucks, my travel mug sporting a white ‘sticky-note’ sticker that clearly states: “remove before serving” that was placed on it by an embarrassingly new barista.

My eardrums are taunt as they strain to listen to two separate conversations from two different locations around me. Vocal confetti that formerly blinded my thoughts and irritated me, but now serves as a balm on my loneliness.

For now my private life consists of reading, writing, watching dvds, sleeping, showering, shopping and gassing up. And those functions performed outside of my airliner-restroom-sized apartment are always done with strangers.