"If only they would talk to one another and not to me"

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being  afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.