terms and conditions apply: the human experience

i walk with fear. not of spaces themselves, but of the people who move through them. the ones who make a sport of presence, who treat eye contact like contract, who regard silence as an invitation. it’s not their company that unsettles me, exactly. it’s the insistence. the persistence. the expectation that i be a participant. the assumption that i want to be reached.

sometimes i think the word for it is misanthropy. other times i think it’s something smaller, more granular. like static, or grit. lately it feels more like repulsion than fear, more like weariness than dread. not agoraphobia. not quite. more like the sensation of being scraped raw by endless exchange. the too-loud greetings. the empty words. the demand to smile, to respond, to play along.

what i want is quiet.

what i want is the space not to perform.

people ask how i’m doing. they do this without meaning it. the expectation is not truth. the expectation is rhythm. you say i’m fine, they say good to hear it, and the machine keeps humming. i think about interrupting that hum. i think about answering honestly. i’m unraveling, but thank you for asking. i wonder if it would register. i doubt it would.

it’s not that i believe myself superior. it’s not disdain. it’s depletion. it’s the particular fatigue that comes from being asked, again and again, to translate yourself into something they can hold. something soft. something pleasant. something they can understand.

i think sometimes about not speaking at all. a vow of silence not for god, but for myself. for pleasure. for relief. to live without narration. to experience thought in its pure form, unfiltered, uninterrupted by language. not solitude. not asceticism. just stillness. just the freedom of not having to be understood.

i miss the early days of the pandemic. i miss the silence of it. the long stretches of unpopulated streets. the permission it gave us to avoid one another. the masks, the distance. the shared discomfort that passed for civility. for a time, the world seemed quieter, softer, more bearable.

i tried to fix it in myself. took a job in customer service. smiled until my face ached. practiced conversation like a language i might someday learn. it didn’t take. the exhaustion only deepened. i was wringing water from a stone.

i’m glad i don’t have a best friend now. glad i don’t have someone waiting on the other end of a text, someone asking to fill the silence. i have friends who visit. we meet for coffee. they stay for an hour or two and leave. i like them. i do. but even their presence comes with static — the invisible hum of anticipation, the effort of keeping pace. when they go, it’s like air returning to a room. it’s like standing in sunlight again after a long, unasked-for embrace.

this is the part that’s hard to say: i sabotage. i let things go quiet. i pull away before they can drift. not because i don’t care, but because caring is its own kind of noise. and i prefer the silence.

people tell me i seem otherworldly. not of this place. it’s meant to be kind. a compliment, i think. but it always lands wrong. it makes me feel extraterrestrial. crash-landed. out of sync with the atmosphere. it reminds me how different i must seem, how none of this is instinctual. how much of my life has been performance.

i stand at the edge of the room and still the spotlight finds me. i do not understand its aim. i do not understand why it burns through the fabric of my invisibility. why there is no place quiet enough to disappear.

so maybe it’s not misanthropy. maybe it’s hunger. hunger for something real. for a kind of stillness that doesn't require withdrawal. maybe it’s the longing to witness without being pulled in. to exist at the edge of the world and call that enough.

because the paradox is this: i love people. in theory. i love their capacity for grace. for joy. for art and absurdity. but i do not love the noise. i do not love the version of myself i must become to survive among them. i do not love the smile i have to stitch on, or the words i have to choose carefully, or the questions that mean nothing and go nowhere.

i stand in the crowd and i shrink. every exchange becomes erosion. every answer a dilution. i feel myself go faint, like ink fading from a page.

and still — still they ask me to speak.

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