Our Shared Solitude

'Solitude' Philosopher Philip Koch defined it as "A stretch of experience disengaged from other people in perception, thought, emotion, and action" Solitude is an experience that can exist regardless of physical location, defined by the "absence" of other people, internally otherlessness, a spiritual/philosophical concept regarding the dissolution of self and a literary/existential term for extreme isolation.

At forty-five, Professor Loredana Dove has built her life on control. Keeping her colleagues at arm's length and her students at a distance. At home, her marriage to an absent, quarrelsome wife is crumbling, leaving her to raise their five year old daughter in quiet isolation. She has convinced herself she needs nothing more until Romina Maple crashes into her classroom.

Nineteen smart, and reckless, Romina is the youngest in her year. To her classmates she's the loud, infuriating party girl; to herself, she's struggling with mental health, taking care of her three year old brother and the only responsible adult in a house run by aging grandparents, her defiance masks hunger, her insolence disguises fear.

Their lives should never touch. Yet hunger recognizes hunger. What begins as irritation morphs into fascination, into a closeness neither woman knows how to resist. Boundaries blur. Rules splinter. And both must face the truth: some desires do not starve quietly, and some silences can undo a lifetime of control. Our Shared Solitude is a story of two women who should have walked away yet found themselves consumed by the one thing they were never meant to want.