“You're on the other Pole again, the only inhabitant of the galaxy. Your eyes cannot meet other eyes. Your hearing cannot detect anyone's voice. It's vast and it's empty, a living desert of insanity...

Everything around you passes and overtakes you without noticing you, without talking to you, without taking from or giving to you. You feel that each interaction is unreal and deceitful, that you are all just walking past each other in that empty space between the stars, passengers from somewhere to elsewhere. That you're terribly alone, insurmountably alone, predestined alone, outside and inside yourself, so alone that nothing could attest that you are alive or living...

And it seems that in reality between you and all people there's an invariable distance, that everyone is living in the same unconditional loneliness, that it's not possible to get closer to anyone, even to the ones most beloved, as no matter how close get you'll always remain at the same distance.”

– Georgi Markov, "To My Contemporary"