Blending

Define it, he'd say. He tried. But that's merely solitude with an extended frame of reference, he'd point out.

Then it actually struck him. Down. The definition did. In solitude, the feedback of one's own definition still reiterates oneself. The absence of that last loop is what makes it isolation. 

Darkness is at least amorphous, he thought.

Aging emptiness

She wasn't the type to be moved by the depth of his torment. He was embarrassed. That had stopped moving anybody, let alone her. He wanted to ask her why. He did not.

Elsewhere she said, of course it's not Utopian if the goal of your life is to have your children grow up and claim to have been raised by a depressive.