Your call is important to us

Are we alone? Who among us has not stared up at night sky, marveled at the vast emptiness, and not wondered the same? It seems so impossible, the distances of time and space too vast, but what about those strange lights those campers up at the lake spoke about, that they interviewed on the news, about the lights whose colors changed, and that moved in strange formations, first angular, then elliptical, then pulsing, before they all, like a bathroom light on a closing medicine cabinet door mirror, together moved directly and at once straight sideways out of sight?

And what about the signals? The images that form in the snow of a stared-at tv screen, or the radio station briefly glitched by snippets of sound - part animal, part digital, part something never heard before but somehow resonating and recognizable like an actor’s voice you know you know but can’t think the name of - what of them? A backwards-winding tape of dreams in mid-stream perhaps, or parcelized prayer packets on their way to … where?

The government will tell you it’s sunspot activity, or blips in the power grid. We all want to believe it’s something else, another consciousness somewhere, calling out to us from the dark vast-ness, beyond the stars and the light they shine. Would it make any difference to anyone if the call was coming from inside the house? How well do we know our next-door neighbors, after all, let alone ourselves? So many questions.

Are we alone? At least this question can be put to bed. Just asking it provides the answer, like asking if we are all already dead. Just asking it answers this one, at least. Are we alone? No, obviously, we have each other.