Like your eyes finally adjusted to the light and now you see everything a little too well 😌

I'm not twenty anymore. And somewhere along the way I stopped being impressed by beautiful words delivered at a comfortable distance and started paying attention to something else entirely — behaviour. Consistency. The willingness to still be present when things stop being easy. You learn to read people quickly when you've had enough time to watch how the story usually ends. The man who texts poetically at midnight but disappears when you actually need someone in the room. The one who says "I'm not good at closeness" like it's a personality trait and not a choice. You recognise it now almost immediately — that particular energy of someone who wants the warmth of connection without the weight of it 💔

And what hurts me — genuinely, deeply hurts me — is that this has somehow become the norm. The preferred format. People curating intimacy from a safe distance, keeping enough space between themselves and another person that they never have to truly be known. Never have to be seen on an ordinary Tuesday when they're tired and irritable and not performing their best self. Never have to navigate the unglamorous, grinding, beautiful work of actually sharing a life with someone under the same roof.

Real love is not aesthetic. It's not a highlight. It's who does the dishes when both of you are exhausted. It's sitting in a hard silence and choosing to reach across it anyway. It's building something daily, quietly, without applause 🕯️ And I want that. I have always wanted exactly that. Not the curated version. The real one, with all its weight and warmth and friction.

But I look around and so many people seem almost allergic to it now. Like true closeness became something to manage rather than something to move toward. And I stand here, a woman who is no longer young, no longer naive, no longer willing to pretend that distance is depth — and I feel it. The loneliness of wanting something real in a world that keeps choosing convenient 😔

Do you think people have genuinely forgotten what it feels like to build something real with someone — or are they simply too afraid to try?