I start avoiding Mr. Faraway, not checking Facebook, ignoring my phone. I want to think, and it’s too hard with the endless flow of information coming my way, so I start to block it all out and discover a funny thing: I don’t miss any of it. I start to notice things things around me, remember details, and life seems manageable again. I enjoy the sensation. I call the cable company, disconnect the service, return the box and its endless whirring hum, and savor the suddenly quiet family room.

It’s so quiet, I can think.

I think I should break up with him, but of course, it’s not a good time: My birthday is coming, and he has plans for that, and I’ve bought him a ticket to attend a charity auction with me, and he’s coming to that, too. I should be looking forward to both, but instead, I’m anxious. He’s made plans and probably bought gifts and no matter what they are, if I see him, it will be there, looming – the thing I need to say, the thing he probably knows I’m going to say even if he won’t admit it or bring it up himself.

He calls daily; I mute my phone, but by the end of the week, I finally listen to one of the messages. I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with your phone, he says, and once I hear it, I know that there is never a good time for some things. So I simply try to avoid disrupting his workweek and send him a carefully composed email on a Friday night. The distance is too great, I tell him, and it isn’t geographic.

The problem isn’t that he’s far away; it’s that he’ll never be any closer.

Mr. Faraway’s birthday is over the summer, and I prepare early. He loves miniature war games, but I don’t really understand them in spite of his repeated attempts to explain them and repeated trips to game shops where I can see demonstrations. It’s a challenge to buy him something related to his hobby without asking him what he wants, but what I want is to surprise him, to give him the gift of the unexpected.

The perfect thing appears on Kickstarter: A little set of gadgets designed to measure troop movements in just the sort of war games he plays. It’s nothing he could possibly own, and something he could use in every game. I’m excited, and invest a lot of time trying to decide if he would like the simple set or the fancy set or the brushed steel or the limited edition Kickstarter green, and when I’ve sorted it all out, I click the button and back the project.

I didn’t know that Kickstarter sends an email to all your friends when you click that button, and only found this out  when Mr. Faraway forwards that email the next day, trying to tease me – Getting into wargames, are you? – but in fact, just letting me know that the surprise is ruined before it even exists.

The universe in which every thought and action is a shared experience is limiting; the social obligation that accompanies it – the requirement to comment, even if only with a click – more so. Now, for me to give him a special surprise, I have to do something else, or find a unique way to give the gift, and what began as something that should have been fun for both of us – to surprise, to be surprised – becomes a burden and source of frustration.

The gift arrives well in advance of his birthday, and I put it on a shelf, where I try to avoid looking at it and feeling disheartened when I do.

He comes to visit with his kids right around his birthday, bringing flowers as he always does, and receiving in return a promise that I will, eventually, do something special for his birthday.

Mr. Faraway spends the summer coming and going, too – mostly, he travels to gaming weekends, often with his kids, where he takes hundreds of pictures of miniature troop movements that he posts on Facebook. I glance at the pictures, but there are too many and it’s hard to tell what is or isn’t supposed to be interesting, so in the end, none of it is.

When he visits, we will sometimes stop in a game shop to check it out, and in one of them, I discover the owner is actually a former coworker of mine, who got laid off and started the shop with his severance package. He was an IT guy, and knew what everyone did on their computer when they thought no one was looking, so I leave with some fun stories for other former coworkers of mine, but not a reason to go back to the store, nor any other game shop.

One of my favorite high school bands comes to town, and a friend announces it on Facebook. First live concert in 20 years! My girlfriend and I have seats, who wants to meet for drinks beforehand?

Other classmates jump on board, buying up pairs of tickets and posting about it while I confirm that it’s just not possible for Mr. Faraway to make it that particular evening.

I  remind myself that I only liked a couple of that band’s songs, and that I’m really too old to go to concerts these days, and then I learn how to unfollow threads on Facebook.