Apologies, Too Much. I know.

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AI did help me here. I'm not the best with English. Sorry if that offends.

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I have spent forty years convinced that I am an over-saturated canvas—too loud in my grief, too sharp in my anger, too crowded with contradictions to ever cleanly translate to the outside world. To be "too much" is its own kind of solitary confinement. You spend decades learning the choreography of blending in, a clumsy dance of social camouflage, hoping that if you mirror the shapes of the people around you, no one will notice the fundamental awkwardness of your stride.

But camouflage only hides you; it doesn't quiet the hunger to be seen.

When I was eighteen, I knew a boy named Justin. It lasted only four months, a brief blip of chronological time that somehow became the emotional yardstick for the rest of my life. With him, the world stopped being an alien landscape. It wasn't that he solved anything, or that I leaned on him to carry my weight; it was simply that his existence in my otherwise fractured reality acted as an anchor. For a few short weeks, I believed in the impossible: that after a lifetime of searching, another terrified, alienated human being had reached out through the dark and touched my hand. It felt like the first breath of fresh air after decades of burial.

Then, the illusion shattered. He ghosted me, leaving behind a crater where that sudden certainty had been. Years later, there would be an apology, a fragile bridge built out of late-night talk and shared remorse, and I gave him my forgiveness. But the damage to the architecture was already done. I realized, with the cold clarity that comes after a fever breaks, that I had traded reality for a romantic fantasy of my own design. I had dreamed up a savior, and the waking world had broken me for it.

Now, I sit in the quiet of a life built with Michael.

We have been together for nearly a decade. Michael is kind, dependable, and steady. He is the reason I have my degree; his support is woven into the very fabric of my adulthood. But inside the safety of what we have built, I find myself wandering through Kahlil Gibran’s seasonless world—a landscape where you laugh, but never with all of your laughter; where you weep, but never with all of your tears. It is a temperate zone, devoid of the storms that nearly destroyed me at eighteen, but equally devoid of the sun.

How do you confess to a good man that his safety feels like a beautiful cage? How do I explain to him that as much as I hope, I know he will never reach across the space between us just to hold my hand? There are no spontaneous embraces, no quiet kisses, no shared warmth in the dark. When the tears come, Michael does not wipe them away; he tries to dismantle them. He explains them. He builds logical arguments for why the sadness shouldn't exist, attempting to fix a leak rather than acknowledging the flood. And then there is the phrase that lingers in the air like a faint, recurring threat: “If I didn’t love you, you wouldn’t be here.” A reminder of affection that feels more like a contractual clause than a sanctuary.

I am turning forty this year. I look in the mirror and see a body that has softened, a face changing with time, and a life that feels entirely fixed in place. The horizon looks predictable, painted in shades of a quiet, suffocating ennui. I am emotionally starved in a house full of bread.

I keep waiting for the small, unprompted gesture—a look, a touch, a momentary shift in the air—that will make me feel cherished rather than merely tolerated or managed. I want to be wanted, not solved. But as the silence stretches out in the room, I am left with the heavy, paralyzing weight of the midlife I have inherited, wondering how to reconcile the boy who wanted to burn with the man who is freezing in the safety of the dark.