Dear Fellow Hermit,

My name is Oliver, but most people who meet me end up calling me Ollie. I guess you don’t really have to, though, because odds are you’ll never meet me.

I can never travel to wherever you are, because a big part of what makes me a hermit is the fact that I’m deathly allergic to electricity. This is kind of massively incapacitating, but hey—everyone has problems, right?

I think never being able to meet me is sort of a shame, because I’m not too boring. I can juggle forks like nobody’s business, for starters. I’m also pretty great at kanji calligraphy, and I can whittle a piece of pine into anything— well, anything made of pine. Dr. Auburn-Stache (I swear that’s his real name) is impressed by how quickly I can list every bone in the human body, from the distal phalanx of my ugliest toe all the way up to the frontal bone above my eyes. I’ve read more books than I’ve got hairs on my head, and I am just months away from mastering the glockenspiel. (In case you didn’t know, the glockenspiel is like the metallic, cooler older brother of the xylophone.) I know what you’re thinking, but you’d be surprised how living alone in the woods can warm a person to the delights of glockenspieling.

But beyond all that stuff, the most interesting thing about me is that I’m lovesick.

I don’t mean all that poetical nonsense about feeling the urge to carve a girl’s name into notebooks and desks and trees. I’m not talking moonlit serenades, either, because even my wheezing cat is a better singer than I am.

I mean that if I wanted to be around this girl—Liz, her name is Liz—under normal circumstances, I could die. If I ever wanted to take her out to—I dunno—an arcade (isn’t that what you call those mystical places that are just wall-to-wall electric games?), the moment I walked into a bleeping basement full of neon lights and racing simulators, I’d collapse and start seizing like there’s no tomorrow. Which there might not be, if I hit my head the wrong way.

I don’t think that’s what most people mean by lovesickness, Fellow Hermit.

If I took this girl out to a movie (and I would love to—what are movies like?), the buzzing of the projector behind us would make my eyelids twitch. The shrill screeching of phones in other people’s pockets would drive emerald ice picks into my temples, and the dim lights overhead would burn white and gold in my retinas. Maybe I’d even swallow my tongue.

But I read somewhere that people who have epileptic fits can’t actually swallow their tongues. They do bite their tongues, though; one time after a big seizure I chomped right through mine, and it took Auburn-Stache, like, seven stitches on the top and five on the bottom to make it heal up afterward. For more than two weeks, I wandered around our cabin saying things like “Waf gongan?” and “Yef, pleef” while Mom just shook her head at me, all exasperated.

Mom’s always exasperated. Her face is pretty creased up most of the time, especially around her eyes, even when she’s smiling. That’s mostly my fault, I think. I would never say anything to her about it, because I think it would upset her that I noticed, and then she might lock herself in the garage again for a day or two, or even longer this time.