The novelist Rick Moody says in his wonderful Hotels of North America that blank spaces like hotel rooms—or, in my case, a friend’s apartment in a foreign city—help us to “see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.” They promote introspection and mental adjustment, which is maybe what is so terrifying about them. A person is never so much themselves as when they are alone in a hotel room. The same thing, it turned out, could be said for being alone in someone else’s vacant apartment. I tried to remind myself that I was alone there only because I was waiting for the time to come when I wouldn’t have to be. But under the doubled weight of all that expectation and memory, the days lasted for weeks and the nights for years.