always desired, never wanted

i was not made for hookup culture

There is such a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being desired but never wanted. Seen but never held.

I’ve never been able to do surface-level interpersonal relationships. I want to learn everything about others; to get under their skin and live in their pain with them. To heal them from within. I want to know what keeps them up at night and lose sleep right beside them. What made them cry at eight years old, and who their favorite person is in their family. I want to know their favorite song; the grief they carry quietly everywhere they go. The memories that still hurt when they resurface unexpectedly.

I always love too much, too hard, and too fast. I never learn my lesson.

There’s this emptiness that comes after attention that simply destroys me. Being desired gets old quickly, because I deeply crave connection. I know I’m attractive. I see the way people look at me when I walk past them. I feel it constantly, and it makes me uncomfortable. Yes, attention is nice sometimes, but it gets to a point where you start to feel hollow.

Sometimes I feel less like a person and more like a fantasy. Something to be admired briefly, desired intensely, then discarded. People want my beauty, my warmth, my attention, my softness; but they don’t want the heaviness underneath. They do not want my sadness, my intensity, my complexity. I am desired only as long as I remain easy to consume.

I’ve overcome so much it’s almost absurd, but no one knows because no one ever asks. I am always the one asking out of genuine curiosity, because that’s how I show interest and love; and it hurts when that curiosity is rarely—if ever—reciprocated. I have even been told that I ask “way to fucking much.” That broke something in me that I don’t think I’ll ever get back. It made me feel like the way I care and love are too much, even wrong.

I’ve come to realize no one ever asks me. The people that know me, know me because I’ve told them things. They never asked. And it hurts knowing that people simply don’t care to get to know me. I am simply just another pretty face, another nice body, and that’s it.

I crave connection that others seem to find an inconvenience. I want meaningful, long-lasting bonds. I want real intimacy. I want sincerity and intensity. I want to be someone in people’s life. But I feel like an afterthought. I feel like I am nothing; like a passenger looking out a window of everyone else’s life, but never allowed to step fully inside.

I see others in ways they don’t want to be seen, and it terrifies them. They are so ashamed of who they are, they fear me finding out when all I want to do is hold the ugliness for a little while, just enough for them to feel lighter and like someone is finally seeing them despite everything they have gone through.

But no one ever gets past the shame, and I am always left feeling like a fucking idiot for wanting something human.

I am tired of witnessing others while being completely invisible.

---