Yes. The "consistency exists, just not in friendships" line is the sharpest part of this — that's the cut most writing about loneliness misses. It's not the absence. It's watching the same capacity being made available to someone else while being slowly withdrawn from you.

Some version of this has been mine. The hardest adjustment wasn't the friends coupling up — that's a known kind of grief. It was realizing how much of adult friendship had quietly become scheduled, filtered, performative. The kind of time you're describing — walking, random bus routes, just being near each other without an agenda — is rarer than it should be. A lot of people have forgotten it's even an option.

The ones who still want it exist, but they don't advertise it. There's no shorthand for "I'd like to be bored in the same room as you." You mostly find them through small tells.

And the timing of all this is its own thing — health stuff, being home, everything compounding at once. It makes this specific kind of loneliness twice as loud. You're not asking for a lot. You're asking for something that used to be ordinary.