You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good,… - Margaret Atwood

This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone — other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands — but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.

I’ve been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.