The Loneliness Between Us

Why do you still feel alone

when another heart lies next to yours?

Do you wander through the shared silence,

as if love forgot its way?

We spoke in gestures,

in looks that meant nothing and everything.

The heaviest things were never shouted —

they were swallowed.

Our silence grew roots,

and the roots cracked the foundation.

Loneliness beside someone is worse —

not absence, but presence without connection,

a helplessness that masquerades as intimacy,

longing for true solitude,

but trapped in the illusion of togetherness.

We lived in the same house,

but I stopped opening your doors.

You stopped lighting my windows.

There were rooms inside us

we never let each other in —

not out of cruelty,

but fear of what we might find there.

Is it them? Is it you?

A dance of regret, guilt, unspoken blame —

tangled in every pretext and snare,

as if justice should have chosen sides.

But in love, there are no verdicts. Only echoes.

Far away is a place your mind builds,

not to leave them, but to find yourself.

That place is not the pain,

but the realization of what pain has given:

a sharper understanding of yourself,

and of what love has become.

I feared being alone,

until I saw my reflection in the stillness.

Solitude is not the absence of love —

it is the presence of self,

undistracted, unperformed,

finally heard.

You were still beside me,

but I had already gone.

Not with footsteps —

with decisions.

My silence was not empty —

it was the sound of me walking away, inside.

Loneliness wounds both the heart and pride.

But call it what it is:

not betrayal, not punishment —

but a signal.

Change the name — call it solitude.

And let that solitude be yours,

even in their presence.

Every poem, every silent cry

written in the margins of your shared life

was never helplessness —

it was your becoming.

Not the person who once waited to be chosen,

but the one who chooses peace now.

I no longer flinch at your memory.

The silence is softer now.

There is no echo of longing —

only the sound of my own breath

in a room I’ve finally made mine.

What was built from pain becomes wisdom.

What you suffered in silence becomes strength.

Rise, not from the absence of love,

but from the grave of loneliness within love.

Rise — into another life,

even if they never leave.