I wake up already exhausted from being myself.
Or maybe not even myself,
just the outline of a person
going through motions so rehearsed
they no longer require thought.
Laugh in the right places.
Pretend the hours mean something
because everyone else seems convinced they do.
But most of my life feels like standing in a train station
after the last departure,
watching empty tracks hum with the memory of movement.
you don’t even notice what happens to me.
How the static in my head quiets.
How suddenly I start speaking with certainty,
as if your presence pulls language out of places
The world sharpens around the edges when you’re near.
Music stops sounding distant.
Even the sky looks intentional.
I become someone I recognize.
Like all my scattered pieces
briefly remember they belong to the same person.
I hate how easily my soul bends toward you
like starving things do toward light.
How my entire existence seems to hinge
on whether or not you are looking my way.
even for ordinary reasons,
even for moments that should not hurt,
everything collapses inward again.
The silence returns first.
Then that unbearable feeling
that I have fallen out of my own body
and become a ghost haunting my routine.
I move through days half-awake,
touching objects that do not feel connected to me.
I sit in rooms and wonder
if everyone secretly feels this hollow
or if they were all handed something at birth
that taught them how to exist without borrowing meaning
as if the self is a misplaced object,
as if mine isn’t buried beneath years of surviving,
and trying to become whatever would make someone stay.
In old versions of myself.
In hobbies abandoned before they had the chance to matter.
In the spaces between conversations.
But every path seems to lead back
to the same aching truth:
when I am not loved loudly.
And maybe that is the deepest loneliness of all
but being unable to feel your own shape
without someone else tracing it for you first.
if I was born with some emotional emptiness inside me,
a room with no furniture,
becomes temporary decoration
inside a place that never truly feels inhabited.
You make that room feel alive.
That is what terrifies me.
Not losing you, necessarily,
but losing the version of me
that only seems to exist in your presence.
Because when you hold me,
the world stops feeling accidental.
For a few beautiful moments,
I am not searching for purpose
like returning to an abandoned house:
quiet, dusty, unfamiliar.
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