There’s a timeline that dictates the average, well-adjusted person’s life—earn a diploma by this year, meet your significant other by this birthday, have children by this age. While society has become more flexible with these larger milestones, there’s been little reform for socially acceptable activities on certain days of the year, namely Thanksgiving. We are to spend this holiday feasting on home-cooked family dinners or testing our own culinary skills at a Friendsgiving. It is sad if you do not participate in these pumpkin-filled festivities.

It is Thanksgiving and I am eating alone at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian BBQ. Families and couples squish together in the booths like they are posing for this year’s Christmas card. They have itineraries and places to be: Mom’s for dinner, Aunt’s for a second dinner, and Grandpa’s for dessert. My agenda is a plate of mashed potatoes and an endless supply of charred meat on a stick. All day.

It is not a big deal for me to be alone on Thanksgiving because my friends and family exist. I am alone in this restaurant on this day, but not in life. It is odd how our concern for others’ loneliness is exclusive to national holidays, even more odd that we believe the physical presence of someone else, anyone, is a surefire cure to that loneliness.

I am sitting by myself, but I do not feel alone. I have this weird thing I do where I think of myself as a separate person. It has made me very appreciative of all I do, even if it is not much. I cook for myself, I clean up after myself, I discipline myself at work and in the gym, and I treat myself to chocolate chip cookies and Grey’s Anatomy marathons. A mental coach and emotional cheerleader, I’m like my own perfect girlfriend who wants sex at all the right times.

I don’t mean to sound vain or diminish the support of my friends and family. I owe a great many things to the people in my life. Without them, I would be a new definition of gloomy. But while others like my parents or scholarship funds have generously provided for me, no other person has lived my life. No other person has lived yours.

I’ve stayed in bed with myself on my sickest days, poured myself coffee to endure countless all-nighters, wiped my own tears after heartbreak, and accompanied myself on a reckless and liberating semester-long adventure in Europe.

I am the only one who has experienced all my triumphs and failures, carried my guilt and regret, heard my raw and unfiltered thoughts, and loved me in spite of it all. The dreams I forget the moment I wake up, the ambitions I’m too embarrassed to admit, the times I give up inside and smile anyway—only I know. I have many flaws, but I am glad I understand.

Friends think I’m weird when I laugh to myself with no stimulus—no phone lighting up in my palm and no headphones over my ears. But I’m just responding to Connie’s thoughts. She’s not the funniest person I know, but we share the same sense of humor. And she’s only half the comedian she is the mentor. She struggles, but she does her best. When she reaches the limits of her guidance, she encourages me to write and work through my own problems (because sometimes, neither of us knows what the hell is going on with my life). Most importantly, she reminds me that there are dozens who love me, but there is no love that can replace my own self-esteem.

We dedicate this day to gratitude, and while it is imperative to thank those around us, it’s not wrong to thank and love ourselves.

I am spending my first Thanksgiving alone and I am immensely grateful for the company.

“I think you’re cute,” I said. We were lying on the grass, gazing up at a black and yellow sky. It was his suggestion—the lying down, not the stargazing. He wanted me to sober up and I wanted to make a moment out of nothing.

“I don’t know what to say to that,” he said. A cop-out answer. An automated response. Command not recognized. They say the worst thing that can happen when you put yourself out there is rejection, but that’s untrue. A rejection is an answer. People can move on after answers.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said, and he listened to me. Not a chirp out of him. And so we waited there, shadows in the grass, absent and heavy. We talked about things he did know what to say to and I brought up other people to take the edge off the conversation.

It is an ugly limbo, uncertainty. You think you know someone, what they want and what they are about, but then they give you these looks that make you question who they are. Those are the times you really know a person.

I was hyperaware of the distance between him and me. Lying next to someone does that to you. It’s that much harder to gauge how close they are without turning your head, and you don’t want to do that because then you could be looking right at them, very close to you.

I needed yes or no. I needed him to tell me he only liked me as a friend or that he treated all girls this way. I needed him to tell me I was out of line because he had a girlfriend he loved. Tell me I was too early, too late, or just right because he felt the same way. Tell me I was delusional to think something could happen between us. Tell me I was crazy to think something could not.

We talked back and forth, never again mentioning how I felt about him or how he felt about me. He was the kind who wanted to sit a moment with me, an eternity with someone else.

I sat up and the scenery shifted back to a practical landscape. Plenty of people could make fools of the night—it didn’t have to be me.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I counted the sidewalk cracks as we moved together toward separate homes. In 300 feet, he would turn left and I would stay on the cement tracks all the way to Margaret Morrison Street. It’s where the buses loaded and dropped off kids. The drivers always honked because the kids crossed right when the light turned green. But can you blame them really? It was red when they looked.

200 feet. We passed two girls who eyed us like they knew what we were going to do. People talk, so in a way, I lived my fantasy in someone else’s assumption.

50 feet. I don’t often use words like yearn or hope or wish, but the sidewalk should have been longer. Construction crews are a merciless breed.

We reached the corner. Wind blew. Feet shuffled. Now I didn’t know what to say. The traffic light beside us glowed green, but no cars were there to go forward.

You know when you lean in to hear someone better, but it’s only a gesture and doesn’t really help? It was like that, except we leaned away from each other in a social segue way to an unspoken goodbye. We were peeling our bodies away from the situation. But while our bodies wanted one thing, he gave me that look again. The one that had the answer I wanted—he just had to say it.

But like Newton’s cradle, we swung back in with a force beyond our control and hugged instead. I say “we” because it wasn’t him that hugged me or me that hugged him. I don’t know that either of us wanted it—the kind of want you have in hunger and in love—but it was necessary to deliver and receive, something like a fax. It should have been intimate, me in his arms, his hold warm against the white bath of streetlights. But it wasn’t. His hug was not an embrace but a consolation.

I did not smell him. I did not close my eyes. There was nothing emotional about touching him this time. Maybe we don’t hug to feel closer to someone. Maybe we hug so we can feel ourselves let go.

Sometimes it’s too hard to give an answer, so the other end just has to wait. The most painful part of waiting is the moment you realize you had your answer the whole time. In his silent hug, there was, “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want.” In moonlit footsteps, down Margaret Morrison and up the stairs to my room, there was, “I’m sorry I want.”