When I was eight years old, my family’s house burned to the ground in a chimney fire. In three hours, everything we owned became ash and mildew. It took us one year to recover and rebuild. While my parents filled out endless insurance claims to replace the things we’d lost, my five siblings and I were mostly left to our own devices.

When all of our possessions fade away, something happens to us. We open our eyes, and we look up. We fumble around for another soul and body, someone, anyone, searching for a fellow spark of humanity to remind us that while we all stand on a spinning planet, we are rooted together on solid ground.

These connections that enable us to breathe and belong often come from unlikely places. I imagine being marooned alone in an empty world with just one other person. Maybe my cheery neighborhood postal clerk, or the man who lives upstairs and two doors over from my apartment who is slowly fading from cancer, or the chanting one year-old who stares at me solemnly in the elevator. Whoever.

I imagine that the importance of where we came from, how we looked, and how we lived would dwindle. I imagine that in that emptiness and silence, somehow, some way, we would inch closer and closer. And maybe one day that distance would close altogether. And maybe we would find each other. People.