People used to say things about it that made me feel strange in a way i could not fully account for at the time. The compliments landed wrong. Not because they were false exactly but because they were describing something that existed in a different version from the one i was actually living inside.
The outside version was real in its own way. We were good at the parts that were visible. The conversations people saw. The way we navigated social settings together. The image of two people who seemed genuinely suited. None of that was pure performance.
What was happening inside it was different. A specific kind of loneliness i had not encountered before. Not the loneliness of being alone. The loneliness of being with someone and still feeling fundamentally alone. Of being known at a depth that felt like intimacy but could not quite hold the weight of anything fully real placed on it.
We could not be not okay together. The not okayness always had to be managed, resolved quickly, kept from becoming something that disturbed the surface too much. Which meant that the parts of me that were genuinely struggling had nowhere to go inside the relationship and had to be carried privately instead.
I did not talk about this while it was happening. Admitting it felt like ingratitude. Like failing to appreciate something most people would have been glad to have.
But loneliness inside a relationship is real even when the relationship looks fine. Maybe especially when it looks fine, because then there is nowhere to put the feeling and no one around you who thinks you should have it.
What i understand now that i did not then is that closeness requires being known where it actually costs something to be known. Not just in the easy parts.
Without that, proximity is not the same as connection.
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