You could say that I live alone.

I have a huge two-story house huddled in a grove on the top of a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It has a wrap around porch and a porch swing, a large garden of vegetables and herbs, trellises with climbing roses, and circular gravel drive leading to a detached three car garage, and all the splendor of my domain is populated by…me.

My coworkers at the university suggest to me all the time that perhaps I get lonely or scared up here at night and just stubbornly don't want to admit it. They ask if perhaps I wouldn't be better off with a "toy" or "companion." But I'm not interested in a sexbot or a slave; I want a family. I want my family. And I have it, sort of. I have my house.

Just before my grandmother, Lillian, died, I convinced her it would be a good idea to let me create vid files of our visits. Those visits had always been dream like, recitations of times I barely remember and even before. My grandmother could remember things from before The Warming, before the internet, before AI, before any modern technology. She would tell me stories about she and my grandfather driving places for vacation, seeing New York City before it was underwater. As a child I thought it was a fantasy world she liked to tell me bedtime stories about. As a teenager, I thought she was getting senile, just making it up so she would feel less lonely. But after they put her in the home, I realized that I knew my surrogate mother too well to believe that she had ever meant to do anything but share her world, her time, with me. She had a purpose behind her stories, one that she felt was worth tolerating my bored smiles and light handed dismissal. The vistas filled with people and scenes, the horrors of disease, the shortness of human life. She wanted to make sure I understood what it had been like, so that I could raise children who would never have a hand in returning the world to its former self.

Only I never had those children.

Lillian lived to see me married but not widowed. A freak accident killed my husband before we ever even entered the lottery. We were still in the midst of deciding if we even wanted a child, wanted to risk hanging our hopes and future plans on the chance we might someday win. Then, suddenly, it was too late.

I never found anyone else. I never really wanted to. Since it is impossible to enter the lottery without a spouse, having a child became one more thing I wouldn't be doing in my life. I walked through my life blindly for a long while, not really seeing or feeling anything. I was alone. Everyone I loved was gone and I would always…be…alone.

Completely surrendering my sanity and my future was a viable option in my mind. An ancient poet named Joseph Brodsky once wrote, "What's the point of living if it's followed by dying?" That's what I felt. Every minute I lived was one more minute in a world where nothing mattered, not really.

Instead, I took our savings, stocks, bonds, and the money from the life insurance policy, and I had this house built.

I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted a family. I didn't want a new family and I didn't want a new life. I wanted the family I'd always had. I took everything I'd saved, every vid and audio file, even the oldest photographs and cds, from the real wood antique hope chest Lillian passed down to me, and I gave it to the master houser. "Build my family," I said. "Only you can give them back to me. So do it."

So he built me a family to live with…in this house. I have the luxury version of a wooden shack from a small west Texas town that my housed my grandmother fifteen generations back. The exterior looks like real wood. It smells like real wood. On the porch is a swing hanging from rusting chain that creaks and moans when you rock it. Inside our kitchen, my grandmother makes corn bread and coconut pies from scratch…at least it smells like she is. As I sit on the swing, rocking, her voice wafts through the house singing songs and telling me stories of our family, long gone. I wake up at night and his side of the bed is warm, as though he's just gone to the bathroom or to the kitchen for water, and will be back soon.

Sometimes an illusion is done so well, a magician's slight of hand is so subtle, you really do believe the trick is real. For a split second, you believe that magic exists in the world, and that if it does, then perhaps no one ever really leaves us and we are never really alone. I asked for my family back and I got it, in the form of a house.

You could say that I live alone. You would also be wrong.