Mattering that matters

A good friend of mine found out this weekend that his ex (a man he had lived with for over fifteen years and who he was close to despite the fact that they were no longer 'together') had committed himself to a Maryland mental institution.

My friend went to visit him this weekend and it was sad of course...he sent back a long report that ended with,

I went out the door and along the narrow sidewalk to the distant parking lot. The building entrance faces west, and the sun had just gone below the horizon and the light after the rain was soft. The institution with its patients and attendants was behind me, and not a single person was visible. Walking alone, I had a feeling of
the greatest bleakness I have ever experienced. I felt like there was
nothing anywhere that mattered or had any significance to me. My outlook is
generally bleak, but this was different, and I wonder if it will be like
this from now on.

Driving out of the hospital grounds, there's an small upscale shopping
center. It has a Chipotle, and I thought about going in for a burrito but
didn't. There was a Starbucks, naturally, so I went in and got coffee and
drank it as I drove home. By the time I got home it was dark, with stars
unusually clear after the rain, and far away.

At the same time that I felt for my friend's aloneness, I could nonetheless recognize the universality of the feeling...I've felt it myself, often at the moment of the petit mort, when the boy beneath you, who had up until that very second seemed impossible close, flesh of your flesh, suddenly feels, as the serotonin drains away, impossibly far removed from you, or on certain buses heading south in London at five in the morning after being out all night in parks cruising, or perhaps alone in my apartment, you know, just pacing about, waiting for the noodles to boil so I can make some mac and cheese.

For me though, it is an awareness that while things matter to me, that connection doesn't matter. In other words, it doesn't matter that things matter. Usually I'm okay with that, although being the atheist that I am, I'm aware (and here the chasm yawns) that upon my death, the mattering won't even matter to me. It's less than a pauper could eat on, the mattering that doesn't matter to anyone else but me.