If you cannot be someone to another — if you cannot maintain a reliable self — if you cannot exchange promises and obligations with others — if you only know how to live in parallel spectatorship with others, each an audience of the others — you will passively seek containing circumstances that prevent dissipation.

You will drift along, blown from haunt to haunt, until you drift into a windless space that no longer transports you, where you will settle into the life of a bottled ghost.

Perhaps you will settle in a monastery. Perhaps in a cubicle. Perhaps in some domestic limbo. Perhaps in an identity.

You’ll live a life of awaiting, vaguely anticipating a life to come that never comes, but which provides a semblance of stability to a wisp of being with no integrity or structure of its own.