Because without someone else, we’re only one-half of a whole, or one-fourth of a whole, or even one-sixteenth of a whole. Some people fill in only a tiny fraction of us; others come along and complete us entirely.
Wikipedia estimates that over 106 billion human beings have ever lived. Over 7 billion are alive, right now, on this earth, on this planet, this very second. We can feel alone in a crowd of 7 million people.
Yet imagine going to a grocery store on a Saturday night to pick up a few cans of soup or a bag of flour. Imagine there are twenty people at this grocery store, some old men with high-waisted pants and cracked plastic glasses, liver spots, others, young mothers dragging their children along through the candy aisle. Imagine seven of these people are going home to dinner. Five of them are going to sleep in their cars. That leaves eight people who have no idea what they’re doing with their lives.
And even though eight doesn’t even begin to make a dent in 7 billion, not even a microscopic dent, it still means that eight people, in that tiny little grocery store, feel the same way we do.
We need each other because we need to find those strangers in grocery stores, the ones who look at us, and know, instinctively, that we feel like a ghost. So instead of leaving us alone in our ghostliness, they come back to haunt us-but in a good way.
The kind of haunting that makes the dead long to lift the lids of their coffins and walk the earth again.