alone or Alone?

There are people who see me, which is the cruelty of it. To be seen and not known is a new kind of violence. It is the difference between a photograph and a portrait: one captures an outline, the other names the bones. People know my laugh, remember my jokes, call my name between classes. They stop me in corridors as if they might press a hand to my shoulder. But those hands are polite, fleeting, a checklist of civility. They recognize the shape of me the way a stadium recognizes a voice: loud in the moment, gone in the next breath. Recognition is a coin tossed into the wishing well. It makes ripples. It never buys a ticket to the part of me that hurts. So I practice being smaller. I fold myself like a badly mended shirt, make seams softer so others will not feel the ripping. I shape my silences into polite absences. I become the easy friend: agreeable, punctual, the one who laughs first so awkwardness will not linger. I am a habitat of concessions and rehearsed cheer. I barter my edges for the warmth of proximity, even if proximity arrives only as someone’s back as they walk away. I chase. Not because I am brave, but because I am afraid. I chase conversation threads as if someone might accidentally tie themselves around me and not notice the knot they’ve made. I follow laughter into rooms where it is already whole and resplendent, believing, against better evidence that if I stay close enough, some of it will spill onto me. It never does. Laughter is territorial. It has an instinct for where it belongs. I learn to move faster, to mimic rhythms, to become the echo of what people like. It is exhausting, a constant treadmill with no incline control, a stomach full of borrowed air. The silence has a vocabulary of its own. It is not simply the absence of sound,  it is interrogation. It asks the questions you have been avoiding: Who are you alone? What do you love when no one else is watching? Whom do you keep when you stop keeping score? The silence knows where the mirrors break. It presses on wounds until they hum and insists on answers in the language of memory. When I am alone enough to listen, the silence speaks in names I no longer know how to pronounce. There are nights when the room conspires with solitude. Lights go off room by room until the room is a cave with my breath as its only tide. I pace. I refill the kettle for reasons I cannot justify. I look at the phone and do not call. There is cowardice and also a strange, stubborn dignity in that refusal; to call for company and be refused would be to trade the small authority I have over myself for the humiliation of being denied. So I keep the power that comes with silence, I do not ask, I endure. Endurance is not virtue here. It is a long, private attrition. Sometimes I imagine my life as a public transit map. Lines intersect, names are printed in confident sans-serif. People board and disembark at stops. Some rides are short, some long, some drivers wave and you wave back. But there are routes that pass through you like a breeze through an empty carriage, hundreds of names on the map, none of them stopping where you sit. You watch towns blur by and wonder if you have become a station nobody reads. You wonder if absence is your native terrain. The thought that perhaps belonging is not promised to everyone is the most honest terror I carry. It feels like coming awake and discovering the room has been built out over a cliff. You thought the land extended. You thought stability was a foundation. Instead, you are on the edge. The vertigo that follows is not dramatic, it is patient and slow, like erosion. The idea that friendships are contingent, dispensable, that affection can be transactional and replaceable, this knowledge isn’t liberating. It is a cold lesson in geometry, humans are not guarantees, they are alignments that can shift without warning. Sometimes I imagine the people I want as lamps on a dark street. I step into the glow, and it is warm. I believe it might follow me home. But the lamp is fixed to a pole. It will not follow. I learn, again and again, that I am not the center of other people's trajectories. Each exit chisels something away: maybe vanity, maybe hope, maybe the naive conviction that warmth is refundable. And grief sits where the missing chairs used to be heavy, patient, bone-deep. Grief for friendships that never came into their fullness, grief for chances that decayed into politeness; grief for the parts of myself I folded away and lost while trying to fit. Grief has no neat rituals in this economy. It accumulates in pockets: a text unanswered, a birthday unremarked, a year of anniversaries marked in a calendar only I open. It hollows things out until there is room for nothing but echo. This loneliness can harden into contempt. I catch myself sometimes, tasting bitterness toward people who never asked how I was when it would have been easy, toward crowds that do not rearrange to include me, toward the world for insisting that sociality be effortless for some and laboured for others. Contempt is a shield that feels like iron. It keeps others at bay and keeps me cold in return. It satisfies briefly, and then it leaves me with its own emptiness. But there are moments, painfully brief, like fissures of light, when the weight shifts. A voice lingers on the phone a millimeter longer than expected. A friend remembers a small, absurd fact about me and the remembering feels like a thread catching under my skin. A stranger’s glance is not polished away by convenience, it stays, attentive, curious. These slips of attention are small miracles because they are rare. They do not heal me. They do not fix the structural hollowness. But they are proof that not all warmth is performative, that the map still has stations where people choose to stop.I write because words do not require reciprocity. Paper accepts what others will not. Ink is patient in ways human faces rarely are. When I say names out loud, they do not leave me. When I shape the ache into sentences, I can at least examine it, like a wound held up to a lamp. Writing is not cure, it is cataloguing. It is a way to keep track of who I am when no one else seems to be taking inventory. If this sounds fatal, understand that it is only partially so. There is a stubbornness in me that refuses to dissolve. Perhaps that is survival masquerading as stubbornness. Perhaps survival is also a kind of truer loneliness, it insists on continuing even when reward is absent. We are, some of us, configured to carry on without the applause. We become slow-burning lamps ourselves, offering a faint light that may one day meet another faint light and, in the terrible dark between them, form a constellation. If you are reading this and the words land like a small stone in your chest, I do not pity you and I do not offer pat solutions. I offer recognition. I offer the knowledge that your ache is not singularly yours and that it touches others in ways they may never voice. Maybe recognition is its own strange solace. Maybe in seeing each other we make a temporary bridge across an expanse that feels otherwise intractable. And if you feel dangerously full of these thoughts, if the darkness feels less like depth and more like a pressure you cannot bear, please consider reaching out to someone you trust, or a helpline, or a counselor. The abyss has rhetorical power; it also has a gravity that can be deceptive. I say this because the last thing I want is for this piece to be an elegy written too soon. For now, I will keep naming it. I will keep opening my palms to the small mercies, a text that arrives, a knock that is not perfunctory, a hand staying on my shoulder longer than politeness requires. I will keep being a place where the lonely can rest, even if only for a page. And perhaps, one day, the map will redraw itself and I will find a route that bends toward another person in a way that does not require me to be everything. But until then, I will sit with the fog and learn its accents. I will not make it trivial. I will not pretend it is something else. I will name it, and in naming it, I will not be quite as alone.

“I am waiting”