Basket.

I feel a familiar sense of detachment.

It is a starless night, and the moon is a thin pale slip behind a heavy curtain of cloud. It is one of those nights where light does not overcome darkness, but merely accentuates it. When shifting, mottled shadows cow the normally brave pools of streetside luminescence, and honest men hurry home with coats pulled tight against an unearthly wind.

It is on nights such as these when the world invariably begins to feel like something that isn't happening to me personally. As if it is all drifting past me, receding like passing scenery, unimportant and unremarkable, with me as an equally transient spectator.

And your mind is at its clearest when nothing seems to matter to you.

Thus I use such nights to think. Memories, opinions, isolated bits from everything I've ever read, experiences that were, experiences that will be, friends and characters and personalities and decisions and regrets and ultimate questions.

And I realise, don't we live in a world of strangers? Get on the bus one fine morning and you'll see so many other people sharing your commute. The odd thing is, you can take the same bus every day at almost the same time and you won't see exactly the same crowd. In fact, only one or two would have taken the bus with you the previous day. What happened to the rest? That morning may well have been the last and only time you have ever seen them. They flit into your life for that brief, relative moment and then vanish forevermore. You never knew their interests, motivations, quirks, emotions, personalities and mannerisms. You never will know all the stories they have inside them, tales of humour or pain or injustice that if told to you you might never forget. If the two of you glanced at each other once, you were acquainted for just that brief second in endless, fluxing time.

All stuck on this tiny, tiny piece of dirt, and only ever knowing each other for that short, short, short time. One second, out of the 200,000 years Homo Sapiens has been around in its present form; 200,000 years, out of the 4.5 billion our world has existed. One second, one species, out of so many that we do not know the exact number.

One island, one tiny piece of dirt, floating upon a vast blue sphere.

One tiny blue sphere in the vastness of a solar system.

One solar system in the cavernous wastes of the Milky Way Galaxy, surrounded by so many just like it.

One minuscule solar system in the enormous emptiness of the known universe, populated by literally tens of billions just like it and tens of billions, again, nothing like it.

Perhaps this will make you realise man's ultimate insignificance and sheer arrogance; to declare himself made in the image of a Divine Creator when he is but one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy in one known universe. It is folly; the ultimate folly of religion.

Think about it all.