God's Lonely Man

Its scary to be alive...to feel.

It is, isn’t it?

To wake up and still be here. A cursed endurance. A dragged-out miracle. The days stretch thin. The hours fray. The seconds splinter like dry bone. And underneath it all—this writhing thing: the Unknown.

We claw at it. We beg it to take shape. We stitch together meaning with the thinnest thread—ritual, religion, therapy, sex, brunch. We press our faces against glass, yearning.

For answers. For order. For each other.

We try to pretend it’s all working—that harmony is possible, even while the rot gnaws at the seams. A wink from a stranger. A held door. The warmth of a longtime lover, or a new, trembling hand. Tiny flares of human contact—ephemeral, incandescent, utterly foreign.

Even the smallest spark between us can feel like a cosmic event. And yet still—so alien. So jarringly tender.

It's terrifying, to be alive.

Westbound on the 80, trying to outrun the tail-end of the workday. Gridlock flickered between paralysis and crawl. The lanes braided together like veins.

I felt it then—some terrible amalgam of dread and anticipation blooming in the sternum like black mold.

The car was quiet. Predatory quiet. I sat up, stretched the calcified sorrow from my limbs. The instinct kicked in: glance left, glance right—ancient animal behavior. And then I saw her. Through tinted glass.

Long dark hair, blood-red mouth. Aviators low, eyes high. She looked right at me. Like she’d been dreaming, and suddenly snapped out of it. She smiled—just barely—and waved, like we were the only two survivors of some unspoken disaster.

Her car pulled forward. Mine did not. I didn’t wave back. My sunglasses—fortress. My face—stone. I pretended not to see her. Pretended the gesture didn’t split something inside me. It was too much, that flicker of humanness.

Too raw. Too sudden. It came to me like a ghost I wasn’t ready to recognize.

I reached for my phone. Music—anything to drown the silence chewing on my nerves.

Shuffle. Play. No anticipation, no preference.

And then the song.

That song:

If you’ve known me long enough, you’d know my allegiance to Reign of Kindo borders on spiritual.

This one—this particular track—isn’t just music. It’s a mirror I can’t look away from. Every syllable, every bassline—my marrow sings along.

I didn’t stand a chance.

I cried.

I pulled over to the shoulder like I was crashing into grief itself. Tears came like convulsions—deep, ancestral, without apology. I couldn’t move. Not until the last note faded out.

And then, realization, sharp and clear:

We carry too much. We hoard our suffering in the damp corners of the mind. We pretend we’re built for it—like pain is a currency we can keep stockpiled. But it festers. It swells. It mutates. Eventually, it leaks.

So what did the girl in the car have to do with this? Why the ornate memory? The cinematic detail?

Because she interrupted the burial. She dragged me up from the undertow and handed me a moment—An echo of something real.

And the silence that followed was unbearable.

The lyrics rang out like prophecy:

“Page after page I keep writing these words

Tryin’ to sum up my life to a tune...

There’s no rhyme for my reason and no such demand

For my mind was made up rather soon.”

We want rebirth. We dream of clean slates. We whisper to ourselves in the dark, “One day, I’ll be whole.”

But this life—this stumbling theater of broken things—is rarely that kind. Sometimes you get the perfect cast. More often, you sit alone in a flickering room, whispering what if, I wish, if only.

“But it won’t be long before

I grow lonely, lonely

Long before I grow lonely again...

I’ll be singing this song

To remind me about you

Singing this song so I never forget.”

I don’t know what this is. A confession? A failed exorcism?

I’ve spent years laying bricks around my soul, one by one. Few people have ever scaled the wall. Fewer have survived the descent. It takes an unholy amount of trust to let someone in. And when I do—it’s not without cost.

There’s always a bookmark. A body count. A reckoning. I don’t interact easily.

I don’t want to.

I am, in the truest sense, God’s Lonely Man. A monastic solipsist. A patron saint of vacant seats.

But still—Sometimes I glance toward the living. Across the tracks, across the aisle, through the tinted window. And wonder if maybe it’s time to walk into the fire. To unchain myself from the comfort of solitude. To stagger into the wreckage of this thing we dare call “life.”

But honestly?

“It seems all that I love has been left far behind…”

And some ghosts don't want saving.

They want company.