All the Lonely People

by Mike Gayle

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

When you don’t see someone regularly you imagine them carrying on with their lives as they’d always done from one year to the next, but the truth was things changed. People grew old and got sick, they sold up and moved on; they weren’t frozen in time waiting for the day that you knocked on their door looking for them.