past the point of needing

in the late afternoon light — heavy, gold, indifferent — i make my way home in a silence that no longer feels vacant. once, it did. once, it scratched at the walls, an absence so loud it felt like a scream. now it’s something else. now it fits. i wear it like a second skin.

i used to want connection. or thought i did. i wanted laughter. voices. the sound of people existing near me, around me. i went looking for it in the usual places. crowded rooms, overfull conversations. i mistook presence for intimacy. i mistook noise for closeness. i watched. i waited. it never came.

but time dulls even the sharpest longing. eventually, you stop reaching. eventually, the reaching itself is the thing that hurts. and when you let it go, when you stop hoping, what remains is quieter. easier. not better, exactly. just more honest.

i thought i needed people. for a while, i did. the way you need heat when your bones go cold. but something changed. the warmth, when it came, felt like too much. the touch, too close. the conversation, too loud. it wasn’t rejection. it wasn’t anger. it was forgetting. the way you forget a language you haven’t spoken in years. the words dissolve. the grammar comes undone.

what once felt like punishment is now something else. solitude, reshaped. not empty. not aching. just full in its own way. it asks nothing of me. it does not perform. it does not expect. and when people return, when they call, when they ask, the disruption is harder to bear than the quiet ever was.

they ask questions. they always do. where have you been. are you okay. why don’t you come out. the answers don’t matter. what matters is the weight of being seen again. the demand of it. the performance. all i want is the silence back.

this isn’t loss. it isn’t even loneliness. it’s something else. a shedding. the slow unraveling of need. the quiet understanding that i no longer require translation through someone else’s gaze. that i have stopped asking for meaning from people who never knew how to offer it.

i drift. that’s the only word for it. i drift further. until i’m just a name they used to know. a story they stop telling. i become background. residue. and even that feels like too much.

i am alone. but i am not waiting for that to change.

maybe this is what it means? to move past the point of needing anyone. not a choice. not a statement. just a shift. like fog rolling in. like the volume being turned down until the world grows faint. not gone. just quieter.

and what remains is mine. the hush. the stillness. the slow, steady shape of a life lived without audience.

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