After leaving Thanksgiving dinner and along the forty minute drive back to my Charlotte apartment from Monroe, I pulled into a rest stop so I could pay 4.50 for some disgusting soda flavor that’s sure to kill me some many years in the future. The food was measly this year, but that’s just because the family keeps getting smaller, somehow and some way. After paying for my bag of chips and drinks, I noticed a truck driver sitting in the cabin of his 18-wheeler, his balding hair and thinning mustache growing gray, his body pointed towards the orange face of the sunset. He was eating a sub. I didn’t see his license plate, but I could only assume the old man was from some foreign state entity like West Virginia or New York or Kansas or even, in my wildest dreams, Idaho. But something had pulled him out here, all on his lonesome, sleeping in the back of a truck cabin on Thanksgiving, which is the time that we are supposed to be with our families. Why? That is, why was he all alone, not why did we pick some random day to eat a bunch of food with a bunch of people we barely see?

I thought about this while driving. Did he do something wrong? Was it just the hand life had dealt him? Maybe he preferred it this way. Always some possibility waiting for you down the road with its thumb out, and you just some clueless driver destined to pull over and kick the passenger door open.

Let’s say he did something wrong. Maybe he was bad with relationships, a serial cheater or abusive spouse or avid criminal who pushed everyone away from him through his misgivings. In that case, being alone would be his “punishment.” Maybe a deserved one, maybe not, but ultimately, it is other people deciding that he is alone and therefore lonely. So, then, loneliness is some societal phenomenon decided by society. That would make sense. Like I said before, Thanksgiving is just a date we at one point decided was good enough for all of our families to meet up and eat food. We buy cardboard heart-shaped boxes full of chocolates for Valentine’s Day and mock those who don’t get them. On Christmas, you’re expected to give and receive presents for your friends and family, and on New Year’s Eve you go to a party and shout and cheer when the ball drops and feel the energy of all the other shouting, cheering people around you, themselves just having given holiday gifts and now preparing the words they’ll write on the cards for their Valentine loves.

Then again, it might just be that this is just how things are. Maybe he’s resigned himself to his fate. Recently, you may have heard, there was a pandemic, and lots of people lost their families. There’s also cancer, car accidents, stairs, angry (and suddenly uninhibited) drunks, unsupported ladders, cirrhosis, the bubonic plague is still around, blood clots, etc. Tragedy is a fact of life, as unfortunate as that is. Those are all somewhat extreme, too, of course. He could have a great, happy, healthy family and is simply unable to attend Thanksgiving dinner this year due to work. It’s inevitable that a person is alone in some way at some time, huddled by a fire in some cold, dark woods, spacing out at a party with no one to like, or in the parking lot after work, steeling yourself for your scheduled late-night post-shift Taco Bell order. It’s okay to be alone, or at least it should be. Anything can happen at any point, and it’s only logical that you should be prepared for any setback that might drag human interaction from your clawing hands.

What if he just prefers it, anyways? Lots of people prefer being alone, or at least like to say that they prefer being alone, myself included, though I’m not sure if I’ve picked one or the other just yet. There is an appeal to solitude in a romanticized sense, especially in America. We all love cowboys and samurais and pirates (which one would you rather be?), ignoring that cowboys and pirates were shacking up with each other when they weren’t dying of exposure or some now-ancient disease, and that in feudal Japan you were more likely to be the taxed and summarily executed serf than the “wise” and “noble” samurai. If you want modern interpretations, just look to the Internet. Look upon the oft-worshipped roles of Ryan Gosling in Drive and Blade Runner 2049, where a beautiful and capable man suffers in much the same way as you or I (ignore the bloody and literally gut-wrenching fates of these characters). Look even at the rise of Stardew Valley, players suddenly stricken with the idea that they too can dump their droll office jobs and move to the country and live on a farm, ignoring the backbreaking, soul-stealing, filthy, sweaty work at the heart of a plow. I’m only being so mocking because I’m guilty of this romanticism. It’s certainly good and maybe even righteous to forge your own path, but I’m still ignoring that my “observations” read as moral judgments.

And then again, I’m ignoring one particular major fact. All of this writing, the last six-hundred and sixty-five words I wrote between this paragraph and the first, is entirely conjecture. I saw an old man for thirty seconds and extrapolated three possibilities (and a whole host of irreplicable, non-peer-reviewed, unsubstantiated perceived social phenomena). Reality could be that it’s all of those possibilities, or none of them, or two of them, or some million other things I couldn’t possibly ever account for in my limited, tiny life. I haven’t been writing about an old man, I’ve been writing about a phantom, a projection. Why? That is, why did I write about this old man?

I couldn’t tell you. We all do strange things for many strange reasons, some reasons more accessible than others. I can tell you this, though: that night, I pulled into my apartment’s parking lot, got out of my car, unlocked my front door, then went inside. My roommates were still with their families. I took out the trash, played with my cat, then watched pseudo-scientific YouTube documentaries and read a few pages of a book and watched some disastrously useless TikToks until I started feeling tired, at which point I climbed into bed and turned off the lights. The tenant before me (or the tenant before them, or so on and so on) put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that I forget about, and it’s always a pleasant surprise to see them shining in the late, lonely hours. I keep my window open at night, and from my bed I can see, too, the planes landing or taking off from the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Sometimes, especially when I’m overworked and tired, hazy delusion filling my mind, I wonder where the plane is going, and imagine myself on the plane, or imagine the old man on the plane, someone is on the plane, and the delusion, the hope, the idea, whatever it is, the thing keeping us driving forward, that someone on the plane is wondering, wondering in a gasping, sobbing way, what the people on the ground are wondering about, even if those people don’t exist, is just enough to not feel so alone for a night.