Daphne was always drunk. She would call people on the phone and set the phone down to check on something in the other room, and when she got to the other room, she would forget why she went into the other room. Something in the room would catch her attention. Sometimes it was her face in the mirror. Sometimes it was the weather through the window, or one of the neighbors across the way. Sometimes it was the piles of junk everywhere. She would pick up pieces of the pile and inspect them and put them back down, at which point she would sigh. She would wonder about her phone. The person on the other end had already hung up. She would find her phone and see no new calls or messages and wonder why nobody ever needed her.

Daphne couldn’t keep a plant alive. Daphne had many plants, so she was always buying fresh ones and throwing out dead ones. Her plants got plenty of sunlight and store-bought plant food. They grew thirsty, and then they grew ugly, and then what was the point? They weren’t cats or children. No one would send her to jail for neglecting a few flowers. Her mother told her to have children. She said that this would leave less time and money to waste on plants.

Daphne had a number of boyfriends. That number was zero. But she had a number of gentlemen callers, and that number fluctuated between one and seven depending on a whole host of variables, the weather not being the least of them. She was a very attractive woman. When she was becoming a woman, she grew breasts that stretched her shirts, so she bought shirts that let her breasts breathe. She was never at a loss for attention when she left her apartment. She didn’t let men inside unless she loved them. Her father has been inside. Her last boyfriend had been inside many times. Her boyfriend before that hadn’t been allowed inside, and when he protested, he ceased to be her boyfriend. Men and women ended relationships over every reason imaginable. There were as many reasons to leave a decent lover as there were to keep a crummy job in those days. Having a job could attract a lover, but having a lover couldn’t attract a job.

Daphne ridiculed herself every night while she sat at her computer, smoking and scrolling through pictures and words exchanged in a parallel universe where she was only able to see the people she wanted to see. She saw other people, too, but it was easy to skip over them. Each time she sat down, she would skip more and more people until eventually she didn’t know who she was looking for anymore and she would turn to pornography. Eventually, the pornography went the way of the parallel universe. In its own way, it was part of the parallel universe to begin with.

Daphne counseled at-risk youths, kids that wanted to eat household cleaner or put weapons through their skin unless someone paid plenty of attention to them. Kids didn’t know how to get attention anymore. They grew up in a world where they never had to interact with anyone before adolescence if they didn’t want to, so they had nervous collapses when they were faced with the irreversible consequences that come with genuine human interaction. They all wanted to be loved so much, but they didn’t know how to love. It would almost be considered a vicious cycle, but that would suggest there were some pattern in play. Daphne suggested they create a game in which they all tell each other their secrets—especially the ones they instinctively keep to themselves—in order to foster unprecedented social development and open an avenue for discussion that had blurred boundaries if it had any boundaries at all. Daphne was always drunk.