* * *

You'll never be so alone as you were that night.
Welcome to Lone Valley.
A kind of town that emerges in front of your vision one step at a time.
Everything is hazed. The air itself is hazed, as if it creates a melancholic mist. One you can only see in a lucid dream.
It looks surreal.
Too many autumn leaves, streets too wet from the rain, streetlights way too blurred, nobody anywhere, cats that disappear only a second after you saw them.
Like you're all alone in the world.
Not that you actually are, no. It's like a dream you decided to fall asleep in, because you feel out of place in the world as you know it.
You really are all alone, but then again you alone chose that loneliness.
Why? What is the matter?
You know, You suppose you do.
Because the dark wet streets that devour your almost muted footsteps are whispering the answer all over town. Do you hear what they're saying?
"You going out on an existential walk that makes you contemplate does not make you any different than any other person on this planet. You are nothing special.  You are just another human being dressed in gray who has fallen into the dimension of loneliness. Everyone walks down these streets sooner or later, for loneliness is not just a small lane, it's a town. One that's cut off from the rest of the universe.
It expands and becomes a universe itself. One that is empty."
And as you stand still on one of the paved and wet sidewalks, under one of the many weak and yellowish streetlights, you cannot help but question the realness of your own being.
This street right now is the centre of the universe, and you have a choice - you can either breathe in all the lives you could have ever lived, along with the sadness of opportunities forever missed, and the pain of all the precious people you have lost or never knew, and who now haunt your memories like desperate ghosts, or you can let go and merge with the blackness of space.
You sigh as you realize you're only human. You have never had a choice. Your way is the way of imperfection, solitude, and waiting. Your way is the way of hope. A hope that will come before the last breath, right before the tyranny of despair, a millisecond before Death claims the throne.
Oh my poor, waiting human.
Welcome to Lone Valley.