I'm surrounded by laughter that echoes like empty hallways, voices overlapping in a room full of people who swear they love me.
They text hearts and hugs, they sit beside me on the couch, they say "I'm here for you" with smiles that feel like sunlight on frostbite.
And still I'm freezing in the middle of their warmth, invisible in the crowd, a ghost wearing my own skin.
Love is the cruelest oxymoron.
It holds your hand while it pushes you off the edge.
It fills the room with bodies and leaves your heart in solitary confinement.
It whispers "you're not alone" while the silence inside screams back "then why does every breath feel like drowning in air?"
I smile at their jokes, nod at their stories, let them think the light reaches me.
But the truth is a quiet knife: I am loved, and it changes nothing.
The ache stays, untouched, growing roots in the spaces between their arms around me and the cold spot where connection should be.
I don't know how to tell them that their love feels like rain on a window I'm trapped behind.
I can see it, feel the drops on the glass, but never the soak, never the relief.
So I stay quiet, smiling through the fog, carrying this lonely crowded heart until it finally gives out.
If you read this and feel it too, know you're not broken.
We're just the ones who learned too early that love can be the loudest kind of silence.
They text hearts and hugs, they sit beside me on the couch, they say "I'm here for you" with smiles that feel like sunlight on frostbite.
And still I'm freezing in the middle of their warmth, invisible in the crowd, a ghost wearing my own skin.
Love is the cruelest oxymoron.
It holds your hand while it pushes you off the edge.
It fills the room with bodies and leaves your heart in solitary confinement.
It whispers "you're not alone" while the silence inside screams back "then why does every breath feel like drowning in air?"
I smile at their jokes, nod at their stories, let them think the light reaches me.
But the truth is a quiet knife: I am loved, and it changes nothing.
The ache stays, untouched, growing roots in the spaces between their arms around me and the cold spot where connection should be.
I don't know how to tell them that their love feels like rain on a window I'm trapped behind.
I can see it, feel the drops on the glass, but never the soak, never the relief.
So I stay quiet, smiling through the fog, carrying this lonely crowded heart until it finally gives out.
If you read this and feel it too, know you're not broken.
We're just the ones who learned too early that love can be the loudest kind of silence.
