I Think What I Miss Most Is Not Company But Accurate Emotional Witness

Dear Delyara, I am surrounded by language. Children, husband, work, messages, school, practical talk, the whole endless conversational machinery of adult life. I am not silent in my days. And yet, I can still go to bed feeling almost untouched where I most needed to be met. Because practical communication is not the same as witness. Being needed is not the same as being held. Being loved in role is not the same as being read as a person. I think that is what I am starved for — the kind of closeness that reads me correctly before I have to work so hard to explain myself into being understood. And the lack of that has become one of the deepest forms of loneliness I know.