Concrete Skyscrapers

Distant, alone, independent—those are the words I would use to describe myself.

I suppose I have felt this way for as long as I can remember, though I didn’t always have the language for it. It wasn’t something that arrived suddenly. It settled in slowly, like a habit you don’t notice forming until it’s already part of you.

My parents divorced when I was eleven. That moment, in hindsight, feels like a dividing line in my life—before and after. After the separation, my mother began dating again almost immediately. She moved through relationships quickly, always with someone new, always chasing something I never quite understood.

She was a party girl. She lived loudly, unpredictably, like she was trying to outrun something I couldn’t see.

I love my mother as much as I can. That doesn’t change. But I’ve also come to accept a quieter truth: she was never really meant to be a mother. She would have been better off without children, and that’s not something I say with anger anymore—just clarity. Living with her taught me something I carried into every part of my life: leave before you get hurt. Leave first. Don’t wait to be left.

That lesson shaped everything.

All of my relationships have ended on my terms. I’ve never really experienced heartbreak in the traditional sense—at least not in romantic relationships. The heartbreak I know came from family, from the instability I grew up around, from the realization that love could be inconsistent, conditional, or temporary.

So when I enter relationships now, something in me is already preparing the exit.

I’ve always been the one to leave.

At first, I told myself it was because I didn’t meet the right people. But as I got older, I started to understand something more complicated. It’s not exactly relationships I crave. It’s companionship. It’s intimacy. It’s being seen and understood without having to translate myself into something more digestible.

But whenever I think I’ve found that, it slips away. Or I lose interest. It feels like holding something fragile and watching it dissolve between my fingers. Like a shiny object I was briefly fascinated by, only to realize I don’t know what to do with it once it’s mine.

I don’t know how to stay.

I’ve never been good at expressing myself when it matters most. When I try to explain how I feel, it gets stuck somewhere between my thoughts and my mouth. I choke on it. I swallow it back down. And then it stays there.

Unspoken.

Unresolved.

The only place I’ve ever really been able to express myself properly is through music.

Music is the one thing that makes me feel less alone. I don’t just listen to it—I absorb it. If someone tells me to listen to a song, I will play it until I know every lyric, every pause, every possible meaning buried in it. I will dissect it until it feels like it belongs to me.

It’s the only time I don’t feel like I’m failing to communicate.

When music is playing, I don’t have to find the words. I don’t have to struggle. It speaks for me in ways I can’t.

I don’t have many friends. The people I interact with most are coworkers.

They’re good people, I think. Kind enough, patient enough, the kind of people who try to understand you within the limits of casual interaction. But they don’t really know me. Not the real version. Not the version that isn’t performing, isn’t smiling at the right moments, isn’t pretending that everything in my life is stable or even particularly functional.

There’s a distance between me and everyone else, even when I’m physically close to them.

It’s not always intentional. It just happens.

I’ve learned to exist in silence. At work, I sometimes go entire shifts without speaking unless absolutely necessary. My record is six hours. It doesn’t feel strange anymore. Silence has become something I can sit inside without discomfort.

Most of the time, I don’t even try to break it.

There is one coworker, though, who is different.

He’s quiet too. A wallflower, like me. The kind of person who doesn’t try to fill space unnecessarily. We can be in the same room, working the same shift, and not speak for hours. But it doesn’t feel awkward. It feels… natural. Like the silence belongs there.

And I think that’s what drew me to him.

For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I had to perform around someone.

I started to think he understood me in a way others didn’t. Not because we talked about anything deep or meaningful, but because we didn’t have to. The absence of pressure felt like understanding.

And I don’t usually feel that about people.

I don’t really do “crushes.” That’s not something that happens to me often, if at all. But this felt different. Less like attraction in the traditional sense and more like recognition. Like finding someone who moves through the world at a similar frequency.

I thought he liked me.

I really did.

It wasn’t based on anything dramatic. Just small things. The way he didn’t avoid me. The way silence between us didn’t feel like rejection. The way he stayed present without needing to fill every moment with words.

But I think I was wrong.

I tried to follow him on Instagram. It was a small thing, almost insignificant. But he declined it immediately. No delay. No hesitation. Just a clean refusal.

That confirmed everything I didn’t want to know.

He doesn’t feel the same way.

And it hurt more than I expected it to.

Not because I had built something real, but because I realized I had been imagining it alone.

After that, something in me shut down again.

I went back to how I usually am—quiet, detached, observing rather than participating. I go to work and measure how long I can go without speaking. I go home to an empty house. The only consistent voice I hear is my own, or sometimes my cat’s presence breaking the silence in small, temporary ways.

At first, I didn’t mind it.

But now I do.

Now it feels heavier.

I can’t tell if it’s loneliness or just awareness of it. Either way, it sits with me.

I wish I were more forward. I wish I could say what I feel without it coming out all at once, disorganized and overwhelming. I wish I could exist in relationships without retreating the moment things get too real.

But I don’t know how to do that.

I could say I’m working on it, but that wouldn’t be entirely honest. I don’t know where to start. I feel like I’m trying to learn something everyone else learned years ago, without instructions.

Sometimes I feel like a grown adult who still doesn’t understand how to exist properly in the world.

So I lie.

I tell people I’m fine when they ask. Most of the time, they don’t even ask. And when they don’t, it confirms what I already suspect—that my life is something easily overlooked.

I’ve started to believe that if I have to insert myself into someone’s attention, then I probably don’t belong in it.

I wouldn’t say I’m depressed.

But I would say I feel empty.

And the strange thing is, when I do feel something, I feel it too intensely. It doesn’t arrive gently. It floods everything. It takes over my thoughts completely until there is no space left for anything else.

So I’ve learned to avoid that.

To stay neutral. Detached. Controlled.

Emptiness feels safer than intensity.

But it comes at a cost.

I’ve built walls so strong that even if love itself appeared at my door, I don’t think I would know how to let it in. Maybe I wouldn’t even recognize it.

And yet, sometimes people still manage to reach me. Not fully, but enough to make the walls crack. And every time that happens, I get hurt. So the walls go back up.

Higher.

Stronger.

More permanent.

At this point, they don’t feel like walls anymore. They feel like architecture.

Concrete. Unmoving.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I were different.

If I were the kind of person who wore their heart openly. If I didn’t retreat. If I didn’t leave first. If I didn’t assume endings before things even began.

Would I be happier?

Would anything feel easier?

Or would I still end up here anyway, just with more visible scars instead of invisible ones?

And then I wonder what happiness even is supposed to look like. Not in theory, but in practice. What does it actually feel like to wake up and not feel like something is missing?

Is it peace?

Is it silence?

Is it a connection?

Or is it just acceptance?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to notice a pattern in how people move through each other’s lives. People don’t always stay. They arrive for reasons—sometimes emotional, sometimes practical, sometimes accidental—and they leave when those reasons disappear.

It’s not necessarily malicious. It’s just how things are.

But it does make everything feel temporary.

I’ve started to believe that most people only involve themselves in your life as long as it benefits them in some way, even if that benefit is as simple as comfort or convenience.

Maybe that’s cynical.

Or maybe it’s just observation without illusion.

Either way, I am distant. I am alone. I am independent.

But I can’t help wondering what it has cost me to be all three.