It feels ridiculous to make a salad for only yourself. You wash the lettuce, tear it apart, cut up the tomatoes, add a little dressing, and wonder whether it will feel less ridiculous, hollow, artificial, with the passage of time.
Don't add dressing. No one is watching.

You try to cover the hum of the fluorecent strip light and the fridge with the radio.
The radio is worse. It shouts at you, advertisments, drums and bass, girl or boy groups voicing perfectly timed musical cliches to computerized accompaniments, rightwing shock jocks with switchboards lit up by fear, hate and ignorance, or New Age flatulence masquarading as enlightenment.
Turn it off and that just leaves you with the hum and the salad.

If you dont add dressing, it will be over that much faster.
Then you try leaving out the tomatoes - Then the salad dressing stops appearing, then the salad itself.
Then you're just left with the bowl which, sooner or later, you fill with cereal and milk and then, for the hell of it, you start to add a little scotch to the milk.

No one calls, and after a while you feel pleased with how long it has been since the last time you thought about how long it had been since somebody called.
You can't remember when you last remembered.

You must really be getting good at living like this. And it's just as well because when the phone rings, even when it's a wrong number, a hang-up, or a salesman, you dont want to speak anymore.
You're in no fit state to speak to someone, say, selling you bread, milk, cereal, toilet paper, or scotch.
You have to practice the words and the tone of the small talk, and it always sounds stilted. You're either too vauge or too focused or too polite. The person serving you looks at you funny and you know you've done it badly. You just can't do it anymore...