6.33am

I thought about your last words way too much. In fact, I spent so long thinking how to reply that I fell asleep at an odd time, and woke up at an even odder time, and now six in the morning feels like one in the afternoon.

Though at least I now know how I feel about your words. Truth is, I kind of want you to be a dick about it. It’s a novelty to have someone be a dick about me not giving enough, rather than a dick because I’m giving too much. The conversations I do remember from college were all me boring people to death, then falling silent over a hint of disinterest. I would listen to stories about other people’s lives for hours, just to avoid seeming selfish or like I was monopolising things.

So you’ll see a lot of me trying not to be a monopoly.

Trying not to take up too much space, or semi-apologising for spilling my guts.

But when you get specific about what you want, I can do it. I can tell you what I’m eating right now, as I peck this message out to you in bits and bats: a probably-terrible-for-me ready meal of lamb discs and carrot batons, swimming in a watery gravy.

It tastes about half as good as brown rice and broccoli sounds, but somewhere along the way to where I am now I forgot how to cook. Or maybe I never really learned? As a teenager I subsisted on floury cheese sauce made in the microwave, over pasta that I always managed to boil to death. University was a mess of those death noodles you mentioned, with the occasional slice of toast in between.

Though sometimes I do entertain ideas of more. Of fancy restaurants or hearty home-cooked meals; salads with dressings and sauces made from scratch. Pies with real crusts, gleaming and crisp. Cakes with sweet icing swirls and meat so tender it dissolves in the mouth…

Yeah, I dream about amazing food more than I actually eat it.

As for the book, and the bath:

Little Children, by Tom Perrotta.

And it was so good, I read until the water was flat cold. It had the glossy, enthralling sheen to it that American sadness often seems to have—as opposed to British sadness, which is always so droopy by comparison. We set a cow on fire in a field and go in lifts that stink of piss. Everything is damp and dark and just misses okay by a pathetic margin.

Affairs are conducted in gloomy silence at the seaside.

Thunder never rolls in the distance. There are never any haunting train sounds or bright blue pools or laundry rooms. Nobody finds any poetry.

Not even in our books.

The one I’m starting tonight is already grim and waterlogged. There’s masturbation in it, but the masturbation is a terse, depressing, single-sentence affair. Like any further reflection on it would bring the tone of the book down, or give proceedings a slightly exciting air.

Nothing can be slightly exciting here.

Not even my messages to you, apparently, because now I’m fighting with myself again about whether I should have sent those last few lines. I’ve said a sexual word in front of you, in the middle of our texts about broccoli and being drunk and suffering through depression.

Though I suppose you did say that thing about Chat Roulette, first.

Can I be forgiven for masturbation, when you featured flapping dicks before I did?

8.28am

I wouldn’t worry about scandalizing me with casual mentions of dreary literary masturbation. Sex has always been easy for me to talk about. It’s probably the one genuine thing about me. In my old life I was all about artifice and airs, except when it came to sex.

But you seem shy about it, so I won’t say much more than that. We’ve got kind of a pure thing going on here, and I promise I’m not secretly getting off on all this. Typing with one hand, as it were. It’s not like that. I’m a gentleman pervert.

Plus, to be honest, sex is pretty far from my mind these days. Eroticism’s in short supply around here, what with the catatonic toddler and my impending alcoholism.

Anyhow, I was thinking. Let’s play a game, stranger. Truth or Dare, minus the dare part. We get to ask each other questions, and the other person has to answer them completely truthfully. We each get one pass. Deal?

Here’s one for you: How long has it been since you left your apartment, really? I know you know. How could you not?

9.52am

Is it okay to admit that I liked you calling yourself a gentleman pervert?

Or tell you that I’m not that shy?

I just need to know where the line is, in case I’m the one being ungentlemanly.

And I like the idea of truth or dare. It’s good and specific. It makes me feel like I’m not really answering at all, while answering pretty dreaded questions. I mean, I don’t even think I’ve told myself when I really last left, never mind you.

It took me an hour to work out when it actually was. An hour of pretending I had to clean the bathroom instead of coming up with the number right now. I polished the mirror over the medicine cabinet and scrubbed the bath to a high gloss before I finally gave in and counted.

And now I think I have it: seven months ago I had to grab a parcel that someone had left outside my apartment door. Though does that technically count if it was just in the hallway? It felt like it counted. I had to reach outside while lying down, and when I was done my body was slick with sweat and sort of limp like an old dishrag.

Now here’s my question for you:

Who did you think I was?

9.46pm

First off, apologies. I suggest a game, and then I disappear all day. To be honest…

To be honest, I just don’t fucking know if I’m ready for that one. I tried wording my reply, even started tapping the words out now and then, between errands and chores, but it never looked right. The letters weren’t coming together how I needed them to. The words were all wrong on my screen, like they weren’t real words at all, and so I deleted them, again and again.

I feel like an ass, passing on the very first question of a game I started, but games should be fun, I decided. We’ve built a nice little playground here so far, and I don’t want to be the cat that shits in the sandbox.

I’ll tell you sometime, promise. But not tonight.

Ask me another?

10.02pm

I’m going to start out this letter-message with a plea: don’t feel like an ass!

If you want to go lighter, we can go lighter.

How about this, then: top five films.

No shame over cheesiness is allowed, all answers are valid, films that you just can’t stop watching if they come on the telly are completely permissible.

I will be over here, compiling my own list with so much agonising care you’d think I was a Professor of Doing Top Fives of Things.

11.45pm

Now we’re talking, Professor Stranger.

Top five, though? That’s tough. I’ve got a notepad balanced here on my thigh, with six million titles scribbled down and crossed out and starred and underlined. Ultimately I decided I better approach this challenge from the desert island angle, like these are the only five movies I get to watch for the rest of my life, not necessarily the five best or most important movies ever made.

I’d want a mix. Something that leaves me bawling like a little bitch. Something that makes me laugh until I nearly pee—maybe two of those. Something from my childhood. Something that makes me think deep thoughts…

So here we go.

Fuck, this feels like such a monumental proclamation.

Okay, I think mine are: The Green Mile. The Jerk. Being John Malkovich. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (for both nostalgia and seasonality, because the holidays get lonely on a desert island). And guilty pleasure admission, Aladdin. Don’t tell the cool kids. I know ALL the words to ALL the songs. In my defense, I was nine when it came out.

How about you? Top five movies, plus the top five TV show box sets you’d pack to bring to your lonely island. Go.