Something as innocuous as a touch on the shoulder… "We missed you the other day." words and gestures that I want to take out of context, to launch me off in a daydream, hopelessly fantastic wishes.

Trying to latch on to some meaning.

I have learned that it is like reaching for wisps of cloud, stray glinting rays of starlight, fireflies.

Like trying to dance on water.

So I milled around the supermarket today during the witching hour, when only the weirdos, the drunks, and the college students are whiling away their time wandering aimlessly through the aisles. My main task was to procure some soap. I had run out of some very basic material and desperately needed to replenish.

Strikingly, I was treated to two versions of "Breathe," one by Melissa Etheridge and one by Greenwheel, and then Kelly's Clarkson's hit single "Since U Been Gone" One wonders if one of the workers at the supermarket was disgruntled with his or her romantic fortunes.

I could relate.

But I guess it is more elemental than all that. The fact of the matter is that a human being is a social organism, and for me to eschew interaction with other people is ultimately self-destructive and probably eventually fatal. Without others to help me with my self-definition, I wander around in a sea of meaninglessness. A solipsistic fog. An existential mire.

You think about it hard enough and you come to the question of "why am I bothering with all this crap?" and then you can't come up with an answer, and without other people around, it becomes increasingly logical to end it all.

(Don't worry, this is not a cry for help. I swear that I am not actively suicidal right now. Trust me.)

But I cannot touch them. I don't even know how to approach. How to tell someone something as ridiculously simple and guileless as the fact that seeing them in the morning makes me smile, makes me content, even though I know that I've got a whelk's chance in a supernova. That's all, nothing else. It doesn't mean anything more than what I understand.

I don't know.

This is clearly the delirium of the early morning.

Thank God for psychotropic medication.