Of course I didn’t believe him. How could I? He had no idea just how unluvable I was.

This wasn’t just self-deprecation. I’d been in luv – or so I thought – and there’d been people, animals and inanimate objects that I’d once believed to be in luv with me. But it was all self-deception.

Even my parents didn’t luv me. I don’t know that they were even capable of luv. Sometimes I thought they must have luved one other at some point – else why would they have married and had a child? But I remind myself that men and women of my parents’ generation didn’t marry for luv. And father, surely, wanted a child so there would be an heir to his pen-cap empire when he died. He’d often talk about how there’d been a Wilhoken on the Mayflower, carving pen-caps for the Puritan settlers’ quill pens, and how there would someday be a Wilhoken selling pen-caps to human colonists on distant planets, or even aliens (assuming the aliens had ink pens and shirt-pockets).

I fear his dreams will die with me.

Because I’m unluvable.