There’s never been a time I’ve felt more alone than when I smoked a cigarette over a black-hot coffee in an empty parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. Of itself, the event wasn’t all that out of the ordinary, but thinking about it, everything about the day was. I usually drink my coffee black, but that cup had something missing - couldn’t tell you what. And I didn’t really smoke the cigarette, so much as sucked at the tip like the straw of an impossibly thick milkshake, every second my desire dwindling further until it had drawn itself dry. Talk radio wasn’t even doing the job of keeping me company as it transitioned into the seven-o-clock piano jazz hour. I remember, it wasn’t cold enough to warrant a sweater, nor warm enough to go unlayered; the day was effortlessly neutral. All the cars drove themselves by, all some shade of beige - redbeige, whitebeige, bluebeige. The sky seemed distant, the ground really all too close. I was sitting on a curb, huddled tentatively under an arching bush in a state of non-existence. Everything fell silent in my head and I realized that some days, days like that, there was no use resisting the aloneness of it all, the aloneness of an empty parking lot, the aloneness of a lighter that just won’t hold a flame, the aloneness of black cup of coffee in a solitary hand, the aloneness of time, one minute separated always by another minute from the nearest minute, and the same for seconds and hours and days. Sometimes there’s the feeling of aloneness that comes when you know that for every step you take toward something, everything takes one step back; a tiring, disillusioned waltz. The aloneness of finding your notion of reality falling drastically short of the truth about it all.