People keep telling me the longer I'm alone, the easier it'll get. They say it like it's a law of the universe.
But it isn't getting easier. It's getting worse.
I miss having my person.
It isn't that I don't like people. I do. I can talk with just about anybody and find them interesting. But there's a meter inside me, and I can hear it ticking the whole time. Eventually, I have to peel myself away from the world, find a dark room, and sit inside the quiet until I'm full again.
That's my baseline. That's the reality of being me with most people.
But rarely, so rarely it almost feels like a glitch in the physics of my life, I meet someone who runs on the opposite current. Someone whose presence doesn't drain the meter, but feeds it. Someone I can wake up to, fall asleep next to, spend every second in between with, and never once feel sick of their presence. Someone who feels less like a visitor in my life and more like the air in my lungs.
I don't know how to explain what that is to someone who's never felt it. The closest I can get is this:
It's like a kind of starvation.
Most of my life, I've gone without the kind of human connection that gives back instead of takes. So when I find it, I don't know how to be casual about it. I devour them. I want to drink them down to the bottom of the glass, then turn the glass over and lick the rim, because somewhere underneath is a panic that says: this is going to disappear. This is going to be gone before you've had enough. So take it now. Take all of it. Take more than you can hold.
And the part I can't make peace with is that I know this rare thing exists. I've held it in my hands. I've fallen asleep with my head on the chest of someone I never got tired of, and woken up wanting more of them, not less.
But now I'm here again. Alone.
And I just want my person.
That's it.
That's the whole prayer.
But the longer I go without it, the more I believe that people say it gets easier with time because they need to believe it's true. But the truth is, that pang of hunger becomes more painful with time. The truth is that the body remembers what it has been fed, and it does not forget the taste.