The room was full of people and I still felt apart

Dear Delyara, I was around people for most of the day and still came home with that unmistakable ache of not having been reached. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. There were conversations, even some warm ones. There was laughter. There was enough normal social energy that if someone had asked how my day was, I could have said “fine” and not technically been lying. But being surrounded is not the same as feeling met. I think that’s what loneliness is for me now. Not absence of people, but absence of accurate contact. The feeling that something real in me stayed untranslated all day while I kept participating anyway. That kind of loneliness is quiet enough to be hard to defend. It still weighs something.