As I lie here alone, sometimes I think about the little boy from Racine who used to do the same.

That kid would be in his bed dreaming without sleeping.

He’d say things he’d hoped one day to repeat to his kids.

He wondered who he would marry some day, and if it was the girl in his class he liked.

Because, in that little boy’s mind, it was a certainty.

“Everyone gets to have a family if they want one when they’re grown up, right?”

“There’s someone to love and be loved by for everyone, isn’t there?”

“I don’t end up alone, do I?”

As I lie alone now in my 30s, I know the answer to all of those questions: No, no, and … yes.

Truth is, some people are really lucky. And some aren’t.

Some people get to have those things. And some people don’t.

And I can’t even be mad about it really.

It’s absolutely nuts that any of us fall in love at all.

And it’s utterly insane that many actually make it long enough to die by that person’s side.

And real talk, I’m a crazy person.

But I’m different kind of the mad ones.

Because even as I lie alone knowing all this now, if that little boy living in the room at the back corner of that brown house in Racine were to ask me those questions, I’d lie.

I would tell him nothing that I just told you.

I’d still let him dream his little, futile dreams.