Consumed
On the loneliness of an autistic woman
I am forty-three.
I am married. I am mother.
I am the silent, steadfast axis the spinning world tilts on
when the small hand seeks a sandwich, sticky with strawberry jam,
and the big hand begs for the weight of a wage.
I am here.
But I am also
the one you come to
when your computer breaks,
when your thesis needs a fact-check,
when you need the exact right words
to get support for your child at school.
I am a living library, words and worries fluttering beneath my skin, every answer a small, secret spell.
I am Wikipedia with a pulse.
I am Google with a phone number.
And you —
you are so warm on the other end of the message.
You type in paragraphs.
You need me.
For six weeks,
eight weeks,
maybe three months if I’m lucky,
I am necessary.
I am the mapmaker, tiptoeing through the tangled forests of your chaos, charting each crisis with a careful, trembling hand filled with empathy you couldn’t find elsewhere.
I map the escape route.
I build the spreadsheet.
I find the loophole.
I think: This is it. This is friendship.
This is the latch clicking home.
Then the silence comes.
A hush that settles into my bones,
filling every corner of the room with its invisible weight.
Not angry. Not loud.
Just… a withdrawal.
A soft closing of a door I didn’t know was open.
You got what you needed.
You are with your friends now.
You are laughing.
My messages are left unread.
And I am at home
staring at the dull, dried dishes
that have been in the sink for three days
because my work took everything
and there was nothing left for the plates,
nothing left for a shower,
not even the energy to stand beneath the water’s whisper,
nothing left for the performance of being human
let alone easygoing.
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Yet despite my lack of resources,
I borrowed myself further into the unarranged overdraft with my body,
to help you climb out of a pit
I’ve never had a rope or a ladder for myself.
I have sisters.
They love me.
They are in countries I cannot touch
without a plane ticket and a visa
and finances that my pathetic part-time wages can’t supply
and a body that doesn’t betray me if I try.
They are my only adult friends.
They have known me since before I knew
that friendship was a language
everyone else got a handbook for.
I have had friends.
I think I have had friends.
Sometimes I’m not sure.
And even when I am,
something breaks
and I am standing, sole and silent, in the wreckage
holding a broom I don’t know how to use
because nobody ever told me
what cracked.
Was I too much?
Was I too little?
Did I miss the signal?
The subtext?
The thing that lives between the lines
that everyone else can read
like neon signs?
But I am blind.
People do not connect with me.
Not really.
Not the way I connect with them,
wholly, obsessively,
with the force of a love
that would do anything to make you happy.
I want to say:
I am not a vending machine.
I am not a search engine.
I am not a temporary lighthouse
for your one dark night.
But I am so tired.
My job takes the scaffolding.
The burnout takes the walls.
And all that is left is me;
bare drywall,
no insulation,
the raw wiring of a woman
who learned too late
that her brightest skills
are also her camouflage;
skills that make me visible only as help,
never as someone to love.
My helpfulness hides my own hunger for care,
blending my needs into the background so well
that even I have almost forgotten them.
I am forty-three.
I am married. I am mother.
I am the axis.
I am also the ghost at the edge of the photograph
the one who answered every question
the one who builds the boats
and watches them sail away
without her.
If you are lonely like this
if your expertise was your entry fee
and your ticket is always one-way
I want you to know,
especially if you are listening in the quiet,
or the dark,
or the late-night hush that makes loneliness echo louder:
You were never meant to be
a resource.
You were never meant to be
consumed.
You were meant to be
invited.
You were meant to be
kept.
Not because you have something they need.
But because you are here.
