This

He didn’t think his particular brand of loneliness was special in any way. He thought of it as something that was just a part of the human condition like waking up in the morning and having to pee. And yet, even knowing this, as he walked along the river listening to a dog bark somewhere, he couldn’t tell how far away in the dark, he found it hard to not consider his loneliness to not just be an essential part of the human condition but to be instead a particular type of loneliness that only he could experience. A thought pattern which made him lonelier still by confirming his original belief, that loneliness was both an essentially banal and unique condition at the same time, that feeling bad about it would be like feeling bad about having a nose, it was just a thing everyone dealt with, and yet, this reality did nothing to diminish the feeling itself, or so he thought.

He wandered by a koi pond, stopping to buy a few grains of fish food, or whatever it was and dropping it in, watching the yellow and blue and red backed monsters glide along beneath the surface of the green water. He disliked the feeling of the grains between his fingers and he regretted having bought the fish food at all. He would now spend the day smelling like an animal trough. What if he came across a beautiful woman? Perhaps he’d tell her he was a horse trainer. He scanned the area but only noticed a couple of women pushing strollers, families standing at the edge of the pond with a relative in a wheel chair. No one to impress. He threw the last few grains of fish food into the pond in a heap, and, just as he was to turn and go a monstrous golden koi surfaced, brushing the other fish aside as if he were a locomotive and they, mere rail cars, snapping up the food. He could see that the fish was probably metaphorical. But he could not see or hear what Melville had said about water, about it calming the soul. He was finding no peace in staring at the green looking bilge water. Melville obviously meant open water, something free. The fish and the open water were metaphors for the taking, of that he could be sure. He stood up, knees cracking, and walked away from the metaphors and towards a street lined with office buildings.

For how could a person, he thought, possibly hold all of the people he encountered in such contempt, without beginning to hold himself in contempt. He didn’t know if it was  uniquely human trait, or whether it was biological, though, come to think of it, he didn’t know if he thought of humans as mere biological manifestations of Darwin’s laws come to light, as cosmic dust from a very small point exploding infinitely, or as something special, essential. It sort of depended on the day. He’d had a Catholic upbringing, which had not helped him to figure things out at all.