She had been out of the private community for three years. She had not left in any dramatic way, one morning she had reconnected to the social circulation without much ceremony, and within a week the infrastructure of her daily life had expanded to fill the available space, and she had found, to her mild surprise, that she did not miss the quiet the way she'd expected to.
She went to the address on a Sunday afternoon, which was how you reached a private person. You showed up. You knocked. You waited. If they answered, you had reached them. If they didn't, you had not, and there was no way to know whether they were home, or had chosen not to answer, or were simply out. She had known this when she was private herself. She had chosen not to answer sometimes.
She knocked twice and waited. The building was quiet in the way buildings got quiet on Sundays, which was its own kind of texture. She knocked once more, more lightly, and waited a little longer. Then she walked to the stop and rode home.
Her partner asked how it had gone. She said she didn't know, which was accurate.
Her partner said: is she all right? Doesn't it get lonely, eventually?
Aeln thought about the years she had been private. She tried to remember what the loneliness had felt like, and found that she was not sure it had been loneliness exactly. The private life had a different weight to it, thicker in some directions, almost absent in others. She had her own reasons for leaving, which had less to do with the absence than with something else she was still working out.
She said: I don't think that's what it is.