The William Pitt Union was full of people. They all looked the same: jeans, hoodies, too much perfume or cologne. I was in line to get lunch and people were cutting past me, bumping into my shoulders.

“There’s too many people on this planet,” I said to my friend, Mike. “They’re all making me uncomfortable.”

A girl in front of us turned around. Her face was expressionless.

“Yes,” she said. “Plague is the answer.” Then she smiled.

I’ve thought about plague. But chances are I will die a horrible death like everyone else. And I don’t want millions of people to die. People are beautiful, unique flowers.

Flowers that I would rather not smell or look at; flowers that breathe on me and crowd me in elevators, restaurants and public buses.

“Why are you getting on this bus?” I thought this fall as the Port Authority 71A stopped in front of a group of people. I looked out the windows to escape the bodies and stuffy air. I thought about how I owned a car. It was parked two hours away. I used to drive that car over rolling farmland with the windows down, just the sound of the June air. A man behind me coughed.

There are 1,235,841 people living in Allegheny County’s 467,200 acres. That’s a little more than a third of an acre for each resident. Fifty of them were on this bus.

We were all the same, everyone on the bus. All of them breathed and talked just like I do, but somehow this can bother me — when they’re all right there reminding me that I’m just like them. I didn’t want to have to eat or sleep or ride a bus like the rest of humanity. I wanted to be left alone.

I got off the bus and walked in the down 5th Avenue in the same direction as hundreds of people. A guy behind me talked on his phone about his sick mother. His sister in Seattle couldn’t make it in.

When we all get so close together it’s like we can hear the static from the lives around us. It makes the world seem big with people. The silence of space is drowned by televisions, iPods, and the human sound. It helps us feel not so alone. But we are.

You can’t let anyone the whole way in there, and you can never get out. The best we can do is someone close. Family and trusted friends are good. Cities are just strangers sharing the same house.

We have room. This is a big piece of real estate we have here in America. Everyone should spread out. Move out over the plains and get some sky above us, some land between us. We can visit each other from time to time.

The space gets to some people though. A writer I recently met at a reading called herself an urbanite. She lives in Pittsburgh.

“I’ve never felt safe in rural areas,” she told me. “I’ve always been much more comfortable in the city even with the crime and everything.”

I didn’t understand at first. But then, I remembered that when I first came back to Clearfield for Thanksgiving after three months in Oakland, I felt crushed by the landscape. Night was a strange black. Outside there was an unnerving silence. Clearfield County has more than eight acres for each person.

The country was bigger and empty. I felt alone. I felt obscure.

I got together with some buddies over the break and we took an Explorer out into the fields to spot deer. I laid down with my back against the hatch and felt the tires go over the bumps in the dirt road.

I do need contact. Not with many people, but with a place. The dark land outside the car and the voices in it were both part of that place. We told stories and laughed. We’d stop and fall silent to look at deer caught and the light, then roll slowly again down the rough road, bumping our shoulders.