At midnight the city transforms into a collection of glowing rectangles.

Each window becomes a tiny universe.

Someone is baking bread.

Someone is studying for an exam they'll forget in five years.

Someone is laughing loud enough that their neighbors probably smile without knowing why.

Across the street, an elderly man waters plants that have somehow survived another summer.

Two floors above him, a little girl builds castles from blankets.

None of them know they're sharing the same night.

We spend so much time believing our stories are isolated.

But cities quietly remind us that millions of lives unfold side by side, connected only by passing lights and distant footsteps.

Perhaps loneliness isn't the absence of people.

Perhaps it's forgetting that everyone is carrying invisible chapters of their own.