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The weirdest thing happened to me yesterday.

So I decided to kill myself, right? At the train tracks. Just throw myself headfirst into a fucking train, fully resolved and ready to meet my maker. Well that was the plan, anyway. And it seemed like a pretty good one since I'd deemed myself insignificant to this apathetic world. But then on the way there I saw this old homeless guy sitting on the side of the street in shaggy clothes, leaning against the side of a pawnshop, and I asked him his name. "Mike," he said. He looked at me like I was crazy. I get why. Who in their right mind talks to homeless folks? I asked him if he liked cheeseburgers and he said yes, so I went inside this fast food restaurant across the street and bought a cheeseburger with the money I stole from my mom and was going to buy my last meal with. I brought it out to him and he started thanking me over and over again like I was some Catholic saint or Jesus himself and I just said “you’re welcome” and left. But I kept thinking about his name—Mike. I wondered how many people asked his name, or even wondered what it was. I wondered how many people actually knew, and realized that I could have been one of few, if any. I thought about his name so much that it got stuck in my head and now it sounds like some foreign name I shouldn’t be able to pronounce but is so fucking beautiful because it’s the name of someone I talked to.

Later on I saw a homeless woman outside a public restroom, mumbling to herself while tying and untying her shoes. I didn’t have any more money on me but I asked her what her name was and she said “Rita.” I repeated it, thinking it was such a nice, sophisticated name. I asked her if she needed any help and she said no, and then I asked her why she kept tying and untying her shoes and she said “so I don’t forget how.” When I asked her why she would forget something so simple she said she had a strange disease called Huntingtons that was deteriorating her brain and she would eventually be reduced to a sniveling idiot who couldn’t even remember her own age much less how to do anything. She’d eventually need people to take care of her but nobody wanted to because she lived on the street and had no family, so she would probably just end up crawling into a corner somewhere, unable to think or remember anything, until she started shitting herself and wondering where she was and how to walk and then just lay there and starve to death. She told me all this and it made me sad. It made me so fucking sad that I wanted to go somewhere private and cry my eyes out, but in the end all I did was extend my hand and shake hers and tell her it was nice to meet her.

Then I went on home. I kept thinking about her and Mike’s names—how beautiful they were—and I felt good. For the first time in a long time I felt significant. I felt like life had meaning, like I was carrying something important. I knew the names of two rejects who no one else on the planet gave a shit about and I felt like I had to live, if only for that… because if I were to die those unknown names would die with me and be lost.