But one feature of a beautifully ended story is that we can imagine the lives of the characters continuing on beyond it. I can imagine this experience making Marya’s life better, existing as a secret place she sometimes returns to as she rushes around that dismal schoolhouse. I can also imagine it making her life worse: a recurring taunt, a reminder of how far she’s fallen.

And I can imagine the saddest outcome of all, consistent with her life so far: after a few more weeks (months, years) of this dulling life, she forgets about her moment of illumination at the train tracks entirely, the way she once forgot about that childhood aquarium.

What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that we’ve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (“Oh, that poor, lonely person”). We’d understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the story’s virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. She’s not a perfect person who is lonely. She’s an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.