Before I Understood Loneliness – part 1

It’s crazy how time works. One moment you’re sixteen, convinced that love is just around the corner, that maybe the next person you meet will finally become your forever, and before you even realize it, you’re standing in front of your twenty-second birthday cake wondering where the last six years disappeared. Time is cruel like that. It doesn’t stop when you’re heartbroken, it doesn’t slow down while you’re trying to heal, and it definitely doesn’t wait for you to become the person you promised yourself you would be. It just keeps moving while you’re busy surviving. Every birthday came with the same silent wish. Every single year, before blowing out the candles, I’d close my eyes for a few seconds and imagine that maybe next year the love of my life would be standing beside me. I imagined him smiling while everyone sang Happy Birthday, imagined him feeding me the first bite of cake, imagined sneaking little glances at each other across the room while everyone else was busy celebrating. I never wished for expensive gifts or grand surprises. I never cared about luxury. I just wanted one person who would stay. One person who would look at me and silently reassure me that I had finally reached home. Instead, every year, it was just me and my family. People say, “At least you have your family,” as if that sentence magically fixes everything. Family. Such a beautiful word. It sounds warm. It sounds safe. It sounds like something everyone should be grateful for. But sometimes even families become beautiful illusions. Sometimes they’re just people carrying years of pain under the same roof, trying so hard to look okay that everyone forgets nobody actually is. From the outside we probably looked like a normal family, maybe even a happy one. Inside, every person was carrying their own broken pieces, trying to fit them back together while pretending nothing had shattered in the first place. We weren’t living a perfect life. We were simply surviving one day at a time, convincing ourselves that surviving was the same thing as living.