Sometimes, late at night, my loneliness sneaks out from under my eyelids and rolls down my cheek

Please take away my desire to be loved.

I was so near

It always happens when the rest of the world decides to go quiet, when the distractions of the daytime finally run out of breath and leave me entirely alone with the silence. That is when the ambient noise of the city fades, the notifications stop lighting up the screen, and the walls of my room start to feel like they are slowly closing in, pinning me to the mattress.

I lie there staring at the ceiling, trying to breathe through a chest that feels entirely too tight, trying to rationalize a heaviness that has no visible source. I tell myself I am fine. I tell myself it’s just tiredness, just the standard exhaustion of another day survived. But the weight in the center of my torso keeps expanding, a cold, dense mass that defies any logic, pressing upward until it reaches my throat.

I swallow hard, trying to force it back down, trying to lock the door on a grief I don’t even have a name for.

I tighten my jaw and blink hard against the shadows, desperate to keep the composure I spent the last twelve hours faking.

But there is a specific, treacherous hour of the night where willpower simply fails.

You can build the highest walls, you can perform the most convincing version of a person who has it all together, but the dark has a way of finding the fractures.

Slowly, inevitably, the pressure behind my eyes becomes unbearable. It is the physical manifestation of every unspoken thought, every hidden ache, and every moment I had to smile through a quiet panic during the day. And then, without my permission, it slips.

Sometimes, late at night, my loneliness sneaks out from under my eyelids and rolls down my cheeks. It isn’t a dramatic, sobbing breakdown; it is a quiet, rhythmic betrayal.

It is the realization that the insulation has worn through, that the sadness is no longer something I can contain within the borders of my own mind.

It escapes in silent, hot tracks that trace the contour of my face, dampening the pillow, a steady release of a pressure valve that I didn’t even know was at capacity.

The fluid on my skin feels less like tears and more like a confession I’m too proud to make during the day. It is the physical proof of an open wound, an ache that begs the question of why the human heart is built to expand for companionship when it is so often forced to exist in isolation.

I look at my hands in the dark, hands that are entirely capable of fixing things, creating things, and holding things together for everyone else, yet they remain completely empty when it comes to my own life. Why is there a constant, burning design inside of me that craves the weight of another person, the warmth of a reciprocal gaze, the simple safety of being known?

If my path is meant to be a solitary one, if I am destined to always walk back to an empty room and a quiet house, then the design itself feels like a cruel joke. It is a devastating blueprint to be engineered with a profound capacity for intimacy, only to be placed in a desert where it will never be used.

The quiet bleeding under the covers becomes a silent prayer, or perhaps an ultimatum, thrown into the empty air of my room.

God, if I’m meant to be alone, then please take away my desire to be loved.

Strip it out of my DNA. Burn out the part of my chest that still aches when I see two people crossing the street hand-in-hand.

Desensitize the nerves that remember what it feels like to be held, so that the emptiness stops feeling like a shape that’s missing from my side.

If this isolation is my permanent reality, then give me the mercy of numbness.

Let me be a stone,

let me be an island,

let me be something that doesn’t require a fire to keep itself warm.

Because the true agony isn’t just the lack of a person beside me; it is the persistent, stubborn hope that won’t die, the agonizingly loud human need that keeps screaming for connection even when the universe has given me nothing but silence.

By the time the salt dries against my temples, leaving behind a tight, stiff reminder of the escape, the relief never actually comes. There is no catharsis in this kind of crying, no grand release that leaves you feeling lighter when the morning arrives. There is only the numbing exhaustion of having fought a war against your own design and lost.

I turn over, pulling the blanket higher around my shoulders, trying to shield myself from the very air of the room, feeling the profound humiliation of needing a comfort that isn’t coming. I am left with the lingering ache in my throat and the terrifying knowledge that tomorrow,

I will have to wake up, wash the evidence of the night from my face, put the mask back on, and pretend that the person who dissolved in the dark was just a phantom.

I will walk back out into the light, completely intact on the outside, carrying a desire that feels like a sentence, secretly dreading the moment the sun goes down again and the quiet forces me to open my eyes to the dark.