Today's most commonly found species is the crowd. It dominates large parts of the world from the plains of Macedonia to the forests of Aokigahara, from the mountain valleys of Kaghan to the subtropical Everglades. It has a varied physiognomy, such that no two specimens are completely alike. The crowd is always changing, always growing, always dying; achieving immortality in its totality: the crowd is always the same. The crowd is a dangerous thing.

As far back as I can recall, I remember my choice of friends had something to do with my aversion to crowds. The hollow, multi-faced tremulous typhoon of eternal suction had something going for it every day. And there's something about every day being a day of favour and fortune that put me in a certain position of unease – I stayed away from the crowd; the shadows were safer. Initially, I felt the urge to give into to the convex God's regime, to be a subject of that empire that spanned the human race; I must admit I often thought there was little hope for me outside a herd. But then I saw them, the outlanders in the reaches beyond the realm, struggling to read their self written sacred texts, following morals of their soul sounds; those who little flickering candles under streetlights to darken their resolutions of restraint. They became my object of study and I think sometime then I must have eloped with solitude in silence.

I confess, I must have seen an ethereal blaze in the lonely one. That shadowy figure, covered by his loin cloth of self defeat, ridicule and neglect, yet struggling on to find a warmer bed, a source of light, perhaps the next morsel of subsistence; their only source of inspiration being the knowledge of their continued existence. They must have known they were on the right track – they were alive, and that's proof enough to keep going. Yes, I liked the lonely one – not because they inspired me with their seemingly futile struggle, but because I was more like them than any crumb in a crowd.

There is a reason, reason escapes definition when one is placed alone. It is because there is nothing else to weigh him against, and your scale is a flaw monsieur- it doesn't exist and so you say he doesn't. Because his outlines breathe of a sentient odour which cannot be experienced by the experienced. It is new, it is real and it is all that creation has ever done for mankind. Where do you place him? The solitary stalker? The blighted brigand? The fallen soldier? The forgotten wraith? Without characterization, he does not fall into natural selection – he cannot survive, the herd is strongest only in numbers, he will die out in due time: the crowd is rather insistent. What is not atheist, agnostic, Gnostic, theist is a wild card is a pack of jokers. Not a deck of cards which are just red and black either, but wears shifting colours outside our visible spectrum. There are no numbers, just transcendental equations with eccentric anomalies – you know nothing of them; but they exist. Outside society and the planetary orbits, in the tears of a dying star we see eye to eye with the lonely one.

The years have not been wasted yet, we are not 'all'; 'all' is the death of the individual, the prescription of time to live through us as mere echoes of the ticking of clocks that bite down on a drizzle of seconds. There is no 'we', just I and the other and the starlight of dead brambles that play the lute strings of  sensibility.

The lonely one is alone, and for a time, is.