I hate getting so easily attached to things. There’s something so deeply painful about seeing a character on a TV show and falling in love with them. Falling in love with every moment, when they make a mistake or when they can finally say that they are proud of themselves, you see them through it all. You know every frame they are on screen by heart, their lines are forever etched into your bones like couples initials on tree trunks and yet it would never show in an x ray. Of course not, why would it? After all it’s just a character that your family teases you about at family gatherings.
Or, perhaps even worse, a celebrity. A real person who you know deep down that if you had met at some point in time, you would’ve been beautiful. That you would be perfect for each other in some less realistic reality. That searing pain of love curdling in your stomach for someone who can’t possibly know you because they’re always being pulled in every other direction.
I hate talking about this, cause it makes me sound like some fan girl who has an unhealthy obsession with some youtuber or actor or fictional character. Maybe that is all this feeling is, just an attachment to something for the way it makes me feel listened to. How when the person on the screen looks right at the camera, I’m able to make eye contact for the first time in my life.
But I don’t think that’s what it is. I think this pain is, at it’s simplest, unrequited love. The constant twist of a knife in your heart every time you remember that your name have never left their mouth like theirs has yours. The slight twang of jealousy that others will never experience this feeling, never have, maybe never will. That slight burn when you remember that someone else gets to talk to them everyday, just because you drew the short straw and never bumped into them on the street.