My favorite barista has quit working at my favorite coffee shop. When I was having a bad day, when I felt like I couldn't go on, when I wanted to die, when I wanted not to go to work with everything that was in me because I just didn't feel like I could take it...I would get a mocha from her. She would laugh and bubble over with mirth and good humor as she made my coffee and I'd leave smiling and starting to feel better already, even if the tears were still in my eyes. She always called it "happiness in a cup", and it really was. I swear nobody else in Sandpoint makes coffee that tastes better than hers did. I went there this morning and she doesn't work there anymore.

I have just been exposed to this Monkey Sphere Theory. I have a theory to add to theirs: that the "monkey sphere" of people on the autism spectrum might be smaller and deeper than that of a neurotypical person. I become inordinately attached to people, seemingly regardless of reciprocation or the degree to which I mean anything to them. In other words, I don't have to be in their monkey-sphere in order for them to be in my smaller one, where each and every person is absolutely precious and irreplaceable. That hurts. I try to protect myself against this sort of thing, but it's never any good.

This doesn't make sense though, because in addition to the immediate of circle of family, friends, etc that I'm attached to, I have a bad habit of developing emotional attachments (I don't mean in a romantic sense, although as we have seen, that's possible as well) to random people. I'm not good at communicating to people that they mean anything to me. I don't know. Maybe it's never going to make any sense.