"But this was how I'd always been... finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn't anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wonder only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself. "
— Miriam Gershow (The Local News: A Novel)