There is a solitude that does not arise from being alone. It is not the hush of an empty room or the stillness after a voice has gone. It is a condition of living among others, of existing in the same spaces but somehow remaining untouched, visible, yet unable to settle. People speak of love as if it were a birthright, as if it arrives inevitably, like the sun after nightfall. But I have seen enough to understand: love is not owed, nor is it promised. Some of us are not chosen. Not for any particular fault, but for something far less defined. An absence. A quiet misalignment between ourselves and the desires of others.
I have not been disliked. On the contrary, I have often been met with kindness. But there is a boundary to it, as though something within me fails to compel others to stay. I am encountered but not kept. Spoken to, but not remembered. My presence leaves no imprint.
There is no single moment of devastation in this. It is not a dramatic solitude. It is not heartbreak but the quiet knowledge that love, in the way it fills others' lives, does not arrive here.
I have questioned whether I was made not to participate in this part of life but to observe it distant, clear-eyed, untouched. The world does not cast me out with cruelty. It simply does not draw me in. I orbit others, but I am not their centre, nor their home.
Some people leave behind shadows when they disappear, spaces no one else can fill. But I have come to believe that my absence would be a silence that goes unnoticed. The world would go on, unshaken.
If love is what gives life its colour, its urgency, then I live in greyscale.
Not in suffering, but in a quieter register of being. I do not ask why any longer.
I no longer believe in the promise that love comes to all.
That is a fiction built for comfort. Some of us remain outside.
There is a part of me I cannot change. I have seen its effect in the pauses, the polite nods, and the eyes that do not linger. I am not pushed away. I am simply never pulled closer. I am not detested or even discarded. Only passed by.
There was a time I believed this would change. That love was a matter of timing, of finding the one who would understand. But the years have a way of revealing what hope tries to disguise. This is not a chapter. It is the whole of the book.
Perhaps I am misaligned with the world in ways too deep to undo. I have tried to be more like others, to speak in the right tones, to mould my shape into something more familiar. But nothing shifts. The distance holds.
So I continue. I live. I do not wait for what will not come. There is no tragedy in it anymore. Only a recognition of what is.