A supermarket in Tokyo, and a strange kind of loneliness

It was a Tuesday evening and I was standing in the produce section of a supermarket in Tokyo. The store was full — carts bumping, a child asking about something on a high shelf, the quiet shuffle of people deciding between two kinds of daikon. And yet, watching all of it, I felt completely alone. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, ordinary way that I think most people know but rarely say out loud.

I noticed a man around my age standing near the mushrooms, staring at them the way you stare at something when you've forgotten what you came for. I wondered if he was tired. I wondered if he was cooking for one. I almost said something — and then didn't, because there is simply no social structure that permits it. We were separated by nothing more than twenty centimetres and a complete absence of context.

That was the moment. Not a grand epiphany, just a small observation: we are surrounded by people carrying the same quiet thoughts, and we have no bridge. I went home that night and opened my laptop. I didn't know what I was building yet.