Addendum: The Common Ache

thank you all for reading, as always 🖤

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The heart has its way.

No concern for what’s left in its wake.

Sometimes all that remains is the echo of a self.

Maybe loneliness isn’t a curse, just a condition— something we all pass through, like fever, like rain.

There’s a kind of stillness in it, strange and full.

An isolation not just of skin, but of breath, of thought, of whatever the heart does when no one is watching.

We reach— for hands, for faces, for voices that might steady us.

Sometimes we give more than we should.

Sometimes we forget the shape of restraint.

Sometimes we just want to feel less like air.

Lately, the quiet has been louder. There was always someone, before.

Now it’s just this body. This room. This emaciated heart— a house with no translation.

Not empty, just unfamiliar.

Like trying to sleep in a place you used to live.

Still, I stay.

Not out of strength

But because there’s nowhere else to go but here.