How Not to Die Alone

by Richard Roper

The three of them responded with the enthusiasm a chicken might if it were asked to wear a prosciutto bikini and run into a fox’s den.

There was nobody for him to share the story with. No one to help him laugh his way through it. Loneliness, however, was ever vigilant, always there to slow-clap his every stumble.

It was not so much the elephant in the room as the brontosaurus in the closet.

I’m actually on a diet anyway. It’s the one where you eat an entire wheel of brie and then have a bit of a cry. You know the one?”

That was the problem when you spent your entire adult life treating small talk like it was Kryptonite.

The truth was that it had made him see that everyone who died alone had their own version of that chair. Some drama or other, no matter how mundane the rest of their existence was. And the idea that they’d not have someone there to be with them at the end, to acknowledge that they’d been a person in the world who’d suffered and loved and all the rest of it—he just couldn’t bear the thought of it.

Andrew looked at his watch, hoping that there had been some sort of glitch in time so that they had another few hours. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

if I could just accept the ending’s coming, then I could concentrate on enjoying the rest of the song so much more.”

How the hell was he supposed to seem like someone Peggy wanted to spend time with when he sat there worrying himself into a state of panic that he was looking at her left eye more than her right and, for reasons that were hopelessly unclear, talking to her for a very long time about soup?

Andrew found himself immediately anxious from the moment he got up. By the time he was at the office he’d managed to work himself up so much that at one point Meredith sneezed and he spontaneously apologized.

It felt sort of liberating—for a moment he had a taste of what it would be like to send cold food back in a restaurant, or ask people to move down on the tube.

He was just stupidly happy that she was there now, at his side, knowing everything there was to know about him. That, he realized, was more than enough.