I have people.
Good ones.
They make me laugh.
They listen when the world gets too loud.
They show up.
And yet,
There are moments I disappear.
On purpose.
Not out of anger. Not sadness. Not even exhaustion.
Just this quiet need to be unreachable.
To let my skin settle after too much noise.
Because even with closeness,
sometimes I feel like I have no one.
Not in the dramatic, echoing kind of way.
Just in the soft ache that no one fully sees me in the way I need.
It’s not loneliness the way it’s written in poems.
Not the kind that begs to be held or fixed or filled.
It’s a loneliness I carry like a soft shawl
draped around me when my thoughts are too loud and everything else feels like static.
Sometimes I sit in it.
Let it hold me instead.
Silence wraps around me, time slows, everything softens.
And it doesn’t mean I’m breaking.
It doesn’t mean I want someone to knock on my door and ask what’s wrong.
It just means this is how I survive.
By pulling away to remember who I am
beneath the noise,
beneath the jokes,
beneath the trying,
and beneath the loneliness no one quite notices.
And sometimes, loving me means letting me vanish for a little while
so I can return whole.
And when I do,
the world steps back just enough,
for quiet to take shape in me,
Like solitude rinsed the noise from my skin