A thought arrives late at night: you can never really meet anyone. They live in their universe. You live in yours. The best two people can do is run alongside each other like train tracks. Close. Never touching.

It's a beautiful image. It's also a trap.

Parallel tracks don't meet by definition. The metaphor decides the question before the thinking begins.

And notice what it smuggles in. It assumes a self solid enough to be isolated. A sealed thing gazing across at another sealed thing.

Turn around. Look for that self. Try to find its edges.

The search comes back empty.

There is experience happening. No one separate from it, having it. And when the lonely one cannot be found, the loneliness has nowhere left to live.

The tracks were never parallel. They were never tracks.