anhedonia

they speak of love as if it is a language written into the marrow of existence

a sacred inevitability stitched into breath and bone

you will feel it one day they promise

but what if one day has already passed me by unnoticed

i watch their eyes soften at the mention of another name

watch their hands tremble with something luminous and unbearable

this is love they say

this is everything

then why does everything look like nothing to me

perhaps i am phantasmal

a hollow imitation of something meant to ache and yearn

i trace the outline of devotion in other people

like a blind cartographer mapping a world i will never inhabit

you just have not met the right person

but i have met a thousand almosts

a thousand voices that should have ignited something within me

and still my soul remains an untouched cathedral

echoing with the absence of prayer

they call love warmth

a fire that consumes and creates in the same breath

i place my hands into every flame offered

and feel only the quiet indifference of cold light

maybe love is real

i see it everywhere but within

in the fragile way someone says stay

in the breaking voice that whispers please

in the gravity that pulls two souls into inevitable orbit

but i am unbound by that gravity

adrift in some silent elsewhere

where hearts do not fracture because they never form

where longing is a story told in a language i cannot translate

and if this is the truth of love

that it exists so vividly for others

and not at all for me

then i am not unloved

i am something worse

i am untouched by the very thing that makes being alive feel like more than survival