I'm a teenager and so I usually don't think. I feel things - vaguely - but I'm always talking to someone, watching something, listening to something, eating, drinking and finally sleeping.  Never thinking. Not for too long.

So today I did nothing for a while because I've been suffocating the more I felt I wasn't thinking. And I read some and then I put the book down and let nothingness make its home inside my head. Because nothingness is like the nothingness in space; it’s sprinkled with stars and stars are little thoughts.

When I was thinking I realized I was lonely. Well, no, I knew I was lonely. I could feel it - vaguely.  But when I thought about my loneliness I began to think I wasn't okay with it, and it overcame my urge to do nothing. Or rather to text, watch, listen, eat, drink and sleep. 

It wasn't a decision as much as it was a vision or a call. I needed to talk to someone, really talk. In real life. Someone I didn't know and would never see again. 

I thought for a while about how I would meet someone, and where. I took the bus to the graveyard where we held my dad's memorial. I thought it might stir up a sincerity that I had lacked for years.

I was thinking about his funeral while I waited under little corner with an arched roof, brick pillars with crosses engraved in them. I was thinking about the week after he died. After someone meaningful dies, it's a whirlwind. Everything is so fast and messy, feelings bunched up on the highway on their way to your heart, exploding like a burning car.

Everything is fast when someone dies - except for the crying and the silences. Time stops then, but when you look back it still feels like it went by in a heartbeat.

It occurred to me, only because I was sitting in silence, alone with no phone and only the birds chirping as a real distractor, that I couldn't just wait to be found. I had to find someone.

I walked around the graveyard for an hour. I passed person after person, one "Hey, will you talk to me?" choking in my throat each time they came close enough. 

At first the call had felt like a need, sure, but I wasn't nervous when I came or when I sat in the silence, bustling city roaring in the distance. But the more I choked, the more I failed, the more it began to burn into me, that if I didn't talk to someone now. If I couldn't do it, if I was going to be hiding forever, if I had to be found, then I would never do anything in my life. I would go back to what I was doing before, and I would vaguely feel lonesome, and vaguely know that I was stuck in the same loop of the same experiences that meant nothing to me, but I would never get out of it. 

My pace quickened and I breathed so unevenly and loudly as I walked. It became a symbolic gesture. I needed this more than I'd ever needed anything.

I found a man on a bench. He was much older than me, which I tought was good, because I felt like he might understand what I'd be saying when I'd say I was on a mission to complete a symbolic gesture or my life would amount to nothing.

"Can I sit beside you?" I asked when I saw him on the bench. He said of course and spoke in an accent.

He asked me if I could help with his phone. His flashlight was on and he couldn't turn it off. I turned it off for him and he laughed at my ease.

"Are you okay?" he then said and I said yes. I said I just needed to talk to somebody. He understood.

I asked him the same and he said: "I just needed a breath of fresh air. I've been sitting in my bed all day," and he laughed. I laughed too and replied that I'd done the same.

We were silent for just a moment. I was just about to tell him everything on my mind. I felt like I was bursting. I had so much inside me and it had no way out, but to him. 

But he sighed, his breath becoming a silver cloud in the april afternoon. 

"I'm sorry, this is actually terrible timing," his next words became a mumble of "needing to catch a bus before it went" and being "terribly sorry". 

Everything was ripped away from me instantly. I was sitting on the bench and I was smiling and telling him it was okay. 

He said thank you for the phone again and began to pad away. I sat there, completely still, looking out into the graveyard. 

I'm not sure if it was because I was thinking again and I was sincere again or if it was because of how much this idea had grown in significance in just a few hours, but I started crying. 

 If he heard I didn’t care. I cried and I knew it would have hurt less to just walk out of there and never accomplish anything in my entire life. I knew it, but when I was done crying I was happy, even though everything still felt so big and shadow-like inside of me, because I had done it. 

I sat on the bench for another half hour, observing the darkness and the elongating shadows from the gravestones, cast by the evenly spaced lamps among the garden. Everything was turning dark so, very quickly. 

Tonight I had done something profound and life-changing.