A Hard Person to Be Loved

What can I say?
It’s just that

I’ve never been the kind of person
someone would willingly befriend.
Never the kind someone would choose as family.
Too silent, too fake, too far away from the warmth other people breathe in routine.
A face always half-turned,
eyes never steady,
a presence thinning the longer one looks.

I am envy wrapped in flesh,
swallowing promises I never learned to keep,
shrinking into corners whenever life demands spine.
Not brave for others,
not thoughtful enough to consider a world beyond the echo of my own mind.
Out of sight, out of mind 
even for myself.

I don’t chase people.
I don’t even walk toward them.
The love others trade so easily 
messy, sharp, loud, alive 
I was not built for that kind of proximity.
I stand behind the line,
in the shadows,
with frozen feet and a throat that remembers silence better than speech.

Worthless,
the kind of worthless that doesn’t even try.
Who would bother loving something that won’t move?

Too self-absorbed to offer affection,
too envious to celebrate others,
too cold to be welcomed,
too strange to be understood.
I do not know how humans work 
their rules,
their timings,
their hunger to connect.
I do not know how to talk right,
how to soften,
how to be in the room without shrinking.
To be good.
To be… anything.

Silence becomes my default apology.
Distance becomes my shield.
I pretend I prefer solitude,
but the truth is simpler:
I don’t believe I can survive being known.

And in the end,
I only compare myself until the conclusion is always the same:
I am not worthy enough to reach out.
So keep quiet.
Work on yourself.
Stay small.
Disappear properly.

Because it’s this feeling this diseased sense of worth 
that love is a reward I must earn,
that attachment is granted only once I reach a level of myself
I have never managed to climb to.
A deranged logic, yes,
but it sits in me like an old god,
commanding distance,
guarding loneliness,
tightening the unease beneath my ribs.
A thorn that will not loosen,
so I’ve learned to breathe around it.

They say the deeper you fall,
the darker it gets,
until the night begins to feel like company.
Perhaps that’s why my calm only visits after sunset 
when the world quiets enough
for even someone like me
to exist without being seen.
A.V