Last week, a friend of mine, who was not much older than I passed away in his sleep from a heart attack. I had been friends with him since I was a teenager so the sudden passing of him came as a complete shock to me.

I have been wanting to write things about him on here, but I cannot bring myself to do so and I think it’s because there’s something looming over me. I feel awful about making this open because I do not want his death to be about me. But maybe I should say what is on my mind? The timing feels bad, but I also feel the need to let this come out.

For almost two years, I have resided in my apartment alone with my cat. I love my cat, but she is a terrible conversationalist and my extroverted self really thrives on having other human beings around. I don’t lament the reasons for how I ended up living alone, but I think the pandemic and the consequences it has had on my socialisation have manifested in my inability to meet people who could be a potential “nesting partner” so to speak.

I’ve never really lived alone for extended periods of time and when I last did live alone, I at least was able to have friends over or I was not home enough to worry about the lack of another body sharing that space with me. What is different now is that I don’t go into my office that often (twice a week really) and there are days where the lone human interaction I get other than from the rectangles that I stare at all the time are just the nameless people I share my apartment building with.

In my life of not sharing a home with my family, I have spent seven of twelve years with someone else. Three of the five where I haven’t, I always had friends or family coming over, partners who’d spend time at my home or at theirs, or I’d be in the office every day and there would be ample opportunity to see folks after work. The pandemic really put a kink into these options and it has been incredibly painful for me to deal with.

I’m not single. I am dating a wonderful girlfriend locally and have a not-so-serious relationship afar, but none of them are potential nesting partners. The death of Twitter, the shift from my being “very online” to basically not, and lack of travel aren’t really the sources of my problems, but it’s the lack of meeting new folks and being able to socialise without the anxiety of finding myself as ill has taken away my ability to meet new people.

My most serious relationships came from socialising locally and while that is of course not a requirement for me to end up dating towards that partner desire, I cannot argue with its purported success rate–even after splitting, I am still good with two of the past three nesting partners I have had.

Why I am so fixated on the lack of said partner comes back to my friend’s death. What if I were the one to have had that heart attack? Nobody would know for days.

Dying alone scares the hell out of me. It is not something I make that open, but if anyone ever asks me for my number one fear, it’s literally that.

I feel devastated for his wife I should add. This was far too early and they had only been married for just under seven years. He meant so much to her and to have him just die at middle-age without any real warning is something I cannot comprehend. They should have been able to go into retirement together.

I’m seriously going to miss this friend of mine. He had been around for a lot of things in my life and the same for his. And now, I am saying goodbye to him. So many people left messages on his Facebook wall and so much support has been given to his widow. He had people who cared about him deeply.

So while I feel selfish for posting about this on the eve of my friend’s funeral, I just cannot shake these feelings off and just want to vent this out to the world. It isn’t a pity plea or anything, but I sometimes feel that I should make others aware that the cool stuff I share on cohost is often missing the realities of my personal life.

I also know many, many people care about me and many of you are probably reading this.

One of the things I decided last year was to give more to myself rather than to others. I realised this hard during an event last summer that I really don’t do nice things for me. It’s hard because I want everyone around me to be happy, but I think it has come at the consequence of my happiness being pushed aside.

So I quit being a lead and started to socialise a lot more. However, unlike four years ago, the world has an invisible threat that prevents me from being as “care-free” so to speak in terms of seeing everyone I know and love. I know that with time I’ll met this special person, but it’s not going to be as easy as I would prefer.

Not everyone new I meet is going to be intended to be that sort of relationship either I must add. I am also demisexual and demiromantic so it’s a quagmire for me to grasp what I am feeling when it comes to other people. It’s all shades of grey when it comes to romantic feelings and it often sucks.

Anyway, sorry for the real talk and I hope nobody thinks less of me for venting this out into the open. I guess I just want people to know a side of me that I keep under wraps.