**Introduction:** The sun bleeds orange across the Pacific, but here, in San Diego, it feels…empty. It’s a feeling you get when you scroll through countless profiles, each a digital echo demanding attention, validation, a simple “hi.” It’s a landscape built on loneliness, punctuated by a constant, desperate search for connection— a search driven by the haunting question: “Where are you from?”

**Body:** The stories begin to accumulate, pixelated and fragmented, across the digital landscape. Accounts flood with the same plaintive pleas: “Handsome?” “Where are you from?” It’s a chorus of longing, amplified by the city’s vastness, by the way the sun sets over the ocean, isolating and beautiful. You see the frustrated declarations of those seeking solidarity, especially from “angelenos”, seeing Los Angeles as a beacon, a place of identity. You see posts that scream out about how there is no one on here to show that you’re living in San Diego. But it seems only to feed the isolation, fueling the desire to scream “hello!” into the void. One profile posts of an army veteran, saying that you are “spot on” and “friendly”. Others offer personal details, San Diego weather, a love of sunsets, and a shared sense of bewilderment at the seemingly vacant streets. “I’m from Los Angeles, California. Where are you from?” It’s a question repeated, a barrier, a defense against a city that feels too vast, too silent. One person, even expresses frustration for their loneliness, “no men say ‘hi’ to me” and cries. Others, from across the spectrum of age, backgrounds, desires, echo this same sense of disappointment– a single, haunting cry for validation. “I always check the weather in the morning. Now that I live in San Diego, who cares? It doesn’t matter if the sun will be out or not.” It’s evidence of the disconnect between the beauty of the place. It isn’t enough. You keep seeing images of the same message, “San Diego” – over and over, as if the very name is a question, a challenge.

**Conclusion:** And so you are left standing on this coast, bathed in the fading light of another day, in San Diego. A vast, beautiful city that has somehow become a monument to the loneliness of the digital age, a place where the simple question, “Where are you from?” has become an incantation, a desperate plea for a connection that may never come. Your eyes scan the horizon, watching ships pass, the sun goes down, and you wonder if anyone is really listening – who cares?