Once, a man was not alone.
People were around him.
They spoke.
They laughed.
They asked how he was.
But he felt silence.
Not the silence that comes at night,
but the one that appears between words.
He understood:
he had lost no one.
Everyone was still there.
It was only that
no one was looking
in the same direction anymore.
And then he understood:
Loneliness
is not the absence of people.
It is the absence of alignment.