Come, sit down. I'll tell you everything that happened from 2015 to 2024 how 2025 didn't end, it collapsed, and how 2026 began with wounds still wide open.

You'll probably sit there stunned in silence, wondering how I'm even still here.

How I'm still breathing. Still standing.

You don't need to hurt me. Life already did that slowly, repeatedly and without mercy.

"with gifts, flowers or love letters."

But if they asked me on a deeper level, I would say I want to be loved in a way that feels safe. The kind of love where I don't have to overthink if it's real or temporary. I want consistency, someone who stays not just when it's easy or exciting, but even on quiet, ordinary days, I want to be understood without always having to explain every piece of myself. Someone who listens not just to reply, but to truly understand.

I want a love that chooses me every day, not only when it's convenient, but especially when it's hard. A love that doesn't walk away at the first sign of difficulty, but instead learns, grows, and stays. I want to be loved gently, honestly, and intentionally.

Lonely sitting across from people who knew my favourite books, my childhood stories, my preferences and habits. There is a kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with proximity. It's the realization that no matter how much of yourself you explain, some important parts of you remain untranslated. And maybe that's what hurts. That nobody can hear it exactly as it sounds inside your head. People romanticize loneliness because they only see it from a distance. They see records spinning on turntables and books with folded corners and cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling. What they don't see is the grief of having nobody to tell things to. The thought that crossed your mind while waiting for a train. The dream you had at four in the morning. The joke that would've made someone laugh. Sometimes I wonder how much of a person is made from being witnessed. How many parts of us only exist because somebody else remembers them. And what happens to those parts when there's no one left to carry them. There is something almost unbearable about realizing the world continues with complete indifference to your absence. No one is standing at their window wondering where you've gone. No one is counting the minutes until you return. You could disappear into the night and the moon would continue its work without interruption. The traffic lights would still change. The trains would still arrive. Tomorrow would still come. I think what I've always wanted isn't attention. It's recognition.To have someone look at the mess of contradictions inside me and say: I see it. The sadness and the humor. The fear and the tenderness. The person you are and the person you're pretending to be. I see all of it. And I'm still here. Because loneliness isn't the absence of love. It's the absence of certainty that your existence has reached another soul. It's speaking and hearing only your own echo return. It's carrying a heart full of unsent letters. It's waking up and realizing there are entire days where your name is never spoken aloud. And after enough years of that, you begin to feel less like person and more like a ghost. Standing in the corner of your own li watching it happen. Waiting for someone to notice you're still there.

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