u/Emptythiscup

You don’t have to like me but you also don’t have to alienate me. That really sucks. I’m trying to be normal but it’s like impossible now. You can’t unknow that I liked you. Now I don’t feel comfortable. I feel like a fly that won’t go away. It would be different if you were like everyone else but you’re the center of gravity there and I just feel like an intruder when you easily banter with others while clipping responses or straight up ignoring me. As if you’re just waiting for me to leave and being polite in the meantime.

I did crash out. Not your fault, you did nothing wrong. It’s just yet another disappointment for me. I heard you loud and clear, even if you weren’t speaking directly to me. You reestablished those boundaries in a way I could see. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I don’t want you to think I’m waiting in the wings. I know you tend to feel responsible for the feelings of others and that is not what I want. I am ready to stop writing to you. I am ready to let the whole thing just fizzle out. I trust it will.

I will always appreciate who you are and what you have given to the world. In many ways, some you’ll likely never realize or acknowledge. Yeah, no long thing or whatever. Just that I respect, appreciate, admire, and thank you for being you.

No clues. No codes. No signs. No interpretations. No excuses. No reframing it. No waiting. No maybe’s. No settling for helpful friend or acquaintance. No being strung along. No throwing me a bone. A loud, direct, resounding, “This is how I feel and where I’m at.”

“I can’t get the balance right, with all my marbles in the fight.”

I sense that the wisest thing I can do is to limit every interaction with you to “strictly necessary.” I am not good at hiding my feelings. I will shower you with unwanted attention and obvious affection. I will prioritize you over everyone around. It will get weird and uncomfortable. I will undoubtedly start flirting. I’ll start snapping at people on your behalf. As if any of it is my right. I can’t help who I am. I do try, though.

Using up my once a day opportunity to write to you just to say I hate it here and don’t want to feel this for you. That way, I’m not tempted to write a tirade about how I want to smell your shower gel and rummage through your junk drawer. I hate feeling like this and thought I’d taken the necessary step to avoid that. And your self-deprecation does not help. It in fact makes it worse. Your idea that you’re nothing special, I’m imagining things, just infatuated, blah blah blah. It’s mildly annoying. Because I can’t tell you I’ve already read just about everything you’ve written that I could discover. I don’t know you, I know writer you. And writer you has been consistent going back to your college days. I like you, I like them, I even like your melancholy playlists and habit of self-sabotage and never feeling quite enough. AND STILL WANT TO SMELL YOUR FUCKING SHOWER GEL my GOD I hate it. I hate your neutrality. I hate how much I know you empathize with my “condition” and that you do like me, I know you do, just not in that way. And I hate having to stand in that space with you, knowing no matter how close, there’s a gap that will never close. I want to be neutral. I want to shift this focus elsewhere. Do you know the immense restraint it has taken not to search up your name and find every single instance when that’s all I’ve wanted to do for months? And you with your fucking God mode, seeing everything in real time as if that’s not embarrassing enough. Ugh fucking end me already. Sometimes I think about going balls to the wall and cause a scene so embarrassing, I have no option but to leave. But I know me better than that. I’ll continue to respect the boundary, continue to be helpful, and try to manage the agony of it all in-between my lol’s and no this is such a great thing you’ve done here! No matter what conclusion you’ve made about me and what’s going on here, it’s a slice. And I wish I had the chance to just hand you the whole cake. But it never got that far and never will. Sorry just mad at myself. Not you. You’re perfect. In that flawed human way.

Whenever we are next to each other, I want to just ask you a ton of questions. But I worry about so many things. I worry that it would make you uncomfortable but you’d still oblige because you are kind. I would probably not know what is private vs what is fair game because I measure those things in a completely different way than most. I don’t want to make you feel weird like you’re being interrogated. I don’t want to be creepy.

This could be considered a “lighthearted crush” by most standards. But for me to even get to “lighthearted crush” is pretty hard. I entertain people. I explore options. But there’s not really a ton of emotional investment. When I get to the crush point, I’m already emotionally invested. I don’t know how to explain all of that but yeah.

I really don’t like it when people do this to me. When I realize someone likes me, it always feels like pressure. Like they have cherry picked my best qualities and blew them out of proportion. In those instances I don’t even want to be perceived by them anymore let alone engage. And that’s how I see everyone that actually likes me. They’re mistaken. So I try not to do that with others. Or at least not make it obvious when it happens.

I just imagine that you would think you’re ordinary and I’d be screaming internally that your ordinary is my kryptonite. I imagine what your ordinary is and I just want to be ordinary with you. I want to sit in the car in a ridiculously packed drive-thru, starving like crazy on a Friday night, not talking, wondering if we like or dislike the song humming about in the background. That’s what makes my crushes so intense. I don’t think about scenarios where we are in some high stakes, intense situation. I fantasize about super mundane things with them. Like oh. That’s the dryer sheet they prefer. Or oh. They’re pretty careful about where their nail clippings land. Or this is the song they listen to when they’re in that specific mood they deny experiencing. Those are the things I want to know. And I want to directly ask as if it’s my right to know.

But I know how I am. I’m painfully aware that I’m a bit too much sometimes and cross these invisible lines because technically, hypothetically, I can. Navigating situations like that makes me want to just scorch the ground we stand on. Make it so irreversible that my pride wouldn’t allow me to revisit it. I force myself to walk away because I feel like I can’t get close enough and that sucks a bunch and I’ll just incinerate it all so there’s no chance of me crossing those lines. It’s literally the only way out.

I don’t want anything more than just sitting with you somewhere, anywhere, and asking you a bunch of questions. And if you wonder what comes after most of the questions have been answered? Me and you in a packed drive-thru, scrolling through our phones, trying to figure out if we do or don’t like the song playing.

I literally would not hurt you, ever. I had been so mad at you. At times it has felt very justified. I still believe that. I have real reasons to be angry with you.

But I am not. I’m angry with the situation. I’m angry with the approach. I’m angry with the behavior. I’m angry with the affect it has had on me. I am not angry with you.

You have reasons to be angry with me. I have said some pretty cutting things over the years. I think I’m right and could win that argument easily. Hope we get the chance for you to prove me wrong.

I found a picture of you when you were younger. The internet does not forget, ever. The first thing I notice is your eyes. You were thinking. Burying. As you do. The year made me contrast. You were doing that. I was doing something else entirely. We were two souls in the world, living the best we could.

I don’t write just to the you that makes me feel something. I write to the you that never knew I existed. I write to the you that doesn’t exist yet. I write to every possibility of you and in every instance of you, I feel deeply for you just the same.

I promise with everything I am and know to be true and right in the world, I would never intentionally hurt you. I’d never try to make you feel small. I’d never try to make you feel wrong. I’d never try to make you jealous. I’d never do those things on purpose. I can’t control how you react to things but I promise from the bottom of my heart I would never set out to reprimand you for being human and navigating as good as you can.

I love you for real. It’s not limited to romance, procreation, expectations, whatever. You’re a rare blip on the radar of reality. One that I truly believe is quietly keeping it spinning. You’d think “yeah sure okay, catch me on a crash out.” Or “catch me when I fail and fall short.” But I’d say that’s exactly how I know you’re actually real. The things you think are flaws are the evidence that you’re not making any of this shit up. You do not stretch truth. You could. You know you could. You do not shape stories. You have power over that too. You have all of these tools to be perceived as something larger than life and you never use them. When you absolutely could and by all reasonable standards, you would be justified.

You don’t want to be seen but I see you, still. You don’t want to be known but I know you. I don’t know how you like your eggs or coffee or what temperature your thermostat is set to. I don’t know the reactive part of you that would want to put me in a chokehold. But I really think I know your soul. It is familiar to me. Different, so different, but same. And I have no idea why you hide that bright part. No idea why you dilute that. I would love you. I would love you. You wouldn’t have to explain or interpret or cultivate and curate, I would love you. Every little thing, I love you. Stop worrying that I’ve escalated things and taken them out of proportion do you not think I’m smart enough to know the difference?

I could love you.

Imagine if most of your private thoughts were written and posted. I’d like you to hold that image if you feel like judging me for this. I know I could be so wrong. Way wrong. But I like to write to sort. I sound so sure but I am not at all. Sometimes I feel like I can’t process big things unless I see them as words in front of me. It makes me seem so flippant and contrary but I swear I’m more solid in real life. I just have to write to get there.

They aren’t delusions, they are possible. Plausible? Not likely. But not outside of the realm of what could hypothetically occur. In some version of reality, if you believe in that sort of thing, we fell in love effortlessly. We didn’t even have to decide, it just settled itself as necessity.

In this instance of me sorting shit out, it feels like you’re lying like crazy. I know that’s unlikely but in this moment, that’s how it feels. It feels like the worst part of your lies is that it is self-directed. Like you’re imposing the same code you write on yourself. If you can write the code and make it work, it functions, end of story. But have you ever seen someone write technically sound, functional, but still shitty code? I don’t do all that but sometimes I think if I can see the product I can reverse engineer it. I can’t really sort the technical part at all but I can see the shape and language of it all and conclude things. In fact, I think I’d be dead if I couldn’t reverse engineer most of what I see and feel and experience. You start with an idea and build. I see the creation and walk it back to its origin. My method is no more precise than yours. It’s all trial and error. We hit walls and troubleshoot.

Anyway I think you’re strategically vague. And I think your passion bleeds into your function. I think you treat everything and everyone as something in the sandbox and that it isn’t real until it goes live. Until someone can witness and see and experience, it’s just a trial run. But the irony of it all lol you literally just experienced how someone could find backdoor access to your test run. If that’s not the best metaphor for what I’m saying, I don’t know what is. I have literally embarrassed myself hard from getting things wrong about you and I am quite prepared to do it again. Full throttle. No escape hatch.

I think of how conveniently things are just suddenly addressed. Like it’s way too convenient. Either you want me to see it no matter how it is delivered or you think I’m really stupid and ride on my self-doubt. I hope it’s the latter because even though I doubt myself, there’s weight to what I am doubting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care for second guess in the first place. So it’s already put in the scale. It’s already measured. It just needs interpretation. That’s tricky. I see literally everything you do, I just might not always assign the appropriate motive to it. Because I do not read minds. That’s the boundary I hit. But I still see all of it. You can plausibly deny the intent behind things but you can’t deny the things. Those things are live.

I want you to want me. Not because I need you to. Not because I depend on it. Not because you could fix whatever the fuck is wrong with me. But because I just do. I want you to want me because I do. Sometimes I feel like we assign these grand interpretations to things because we think they will be more real, more solid. But I literally live by stripping things naked. I couldn’t function if I didn’t remove every unnecessary thing. What can survive? What is the bare minimum? What is the foundation. Again, reverse engineering it all until I get to the marrow. I can add flourish to my desire and make it sound pretty, give the illusion that it’s some necessary thing, written in the stars. But the truth for how I see it is that something in me wants something in you and it can’t be explained beyond that. I can fantasize. I can imagine scenarios. All of the perfect thing. All subjective. Up for interpretation. Objectively, I just want you and I want you to want me. That’s really the bottom line.

I want you just because. That’s it.

I reread what I wrote. I should have just wrote a fantasy scenario. Something pretty. One of the many scenes where everything sticks. Maybe I’ll do that next time. Kind of regret I didn’t do it this time because nothing I wrote filled me. It just made me realize how empty I really am.

I was wrong about you. I did make some pretty inaccurate inferences about who you are and why you do what you do. And I knew I wasn’t a mind reader, I knew I’d be wrong. But the way I felt relied very heavily on me not getting two of those things wrong. One, how you’d deal with me. And two, why you do what you do.

I thought I did matter in a way that actually meant something. Not romantically, just…mattered. And I don’t. People come, people go. It’s me, I’m people. Just another one in the revolving door of your life. That does really suck.

But more importantly, I thought what you did mattered to you. And it did. It does. Just not the way it matters to me. The way you so flippantly described the origin story made me realize that it wasn’t as deep as I thought it was. I inferred a ton of characteristics and qualities about you based on an idea that was just so wrong.

And nothing about you changes just because I’ve made so many assumptions about you. You’re still you, you still live your life, and it’s still none of my business whatsoever. The brain does whatever it has to do to keep a belief in tact. I didn’t fall for you, I somersaulted for you. I tumbled and cartwheeled into a fantasy. That’s on me.

It’s a terrible cycle to be in that’s for sure. You do something I admire. You are simply decent to me. You show even the slightest bit more of your personality. I get a dopamine surge. I take to the void and write to my heart’s content. It makes me feel euphoric like something actually moved. Something progressed. And then I feel ignored or dismissed by you and it crashes down. And I realize that I’m alone. Just me and my thoughts and my words and a bunch of strangers that know nothing about me. And you know nothing about me. And I have to stop doing this. Reality couldn’t be clearer. You think I’m nice. You think I’m helpful. But I’m just another person. If I went away tomorrow, you wouldn’t notice. Eventually you would but it would be more of a “wonder whatever happened to them” situation. You wouldn’t reach out to check in and see if I’m okay. I could fade out of frame and your scenery wouldn’t change a bit. Like a little plant in a big garden. Hardly noticed and wouldn’t miss it. And I know this sounds very depressing. I’m a little bummed I mean okay maybe massively but seeing reality for what it is can be like that sometimes. Glad you’re doing well and making things happen.

Please keep talking to me. Please don’t disappear. Please don’t just react to my responses, please respond. Please get to know me. Please see I don’t mean any harm. Pleased know I wouldn’t do anything to make you uncomfortable. Please trust I would respect your boundaries but please also don’t leave me hanging. If it had to be in the content we usually talk, please be more consistent. Please just at least let me in or you more that way. We don’t have to get married. Just let me know you.