I have never been good at pretending people mean nothing to me.

I do not want to do it. If I care, it shows. If I love, it shows even more. There is nothing neat about it. Nothing polished. Nothing safe. I do not let people stand on the edge of my life and dip their toes in. If I open the door, they step into something serious. They step into truth, into loyalty, into attention so complete it can feel almost frightening. And yes, that has made my life harder. It has also made it real. I would rather be cut open by what I feel than spend my years performing indifference like some emotionally stunted fraud in expensive perfume. I am not built for shallow people doing deep impressions. That is what so much of this is now, is it not? A lot of mouths are saying beautiful things they have no intention of carrying. A lot of almosts dressed up as destiny. A lot of convenient affection from people who want to be adored but not known, wanted but not required, held but never held accountable. How charming. How modern. How embarrassingly transparent. They send the right words at midnight, disappear by morning, then act surprised when you notice the gap between what they say and what they actually are. As if inconsistency is mysterious. As if emotional laziness is somehow magnetic. Please. That is not depth. That is cowardice with decent lighting. And I have tried, God knows I have tried, to be easier. I have tried to loosen my grip on meaning. I have told myself not to read so much into things, not to invest too quickly, not to care so hard when the world so clearly rewards those who keep one foot out the door. I have watched people float through connection like tourists, touching nothing properly, ruining nothing in themselves because they never offer enough of themselves to be changed. There are days when I have envied them. It must be nice, I suppose, to leave no fingerprints anywhere, to move through people without ever being moved in return. It must be lovely to live in that thin little emotional corridor where nothing is asked, nothing is risked, and nothing is ever truly given. But I cannot stay there. I try to skim the surface and always end up beneath it, where things are heavier, truer, and far less forgiving. That is the thing about me. I do not care about fractions. I do not love by instalments. I do not give people edited versions of my devotion so they can enjoy the warmth without feeling the weight. When someone matters to me, they matter everywhere. In the way I listen. In what I remember. In what I notice before they say a word. In how my body registers their distance before my mind has found an excuse for it. I feel shifts. I hear what is wrong in silence. I catch the pause between words and know there is blood in it. That is not drama. That is not madness. That is the burden of being wired for sincerity in a world that keeps trying to downgrade everything sacred into something casual and disposable. And because I feel like this, I have been hurt in ways colder people will never understand. Not because they are stronger, but because they are less available to life. There is a difference. They call women like me too much because it saves them from admitting they are not enough. It is easier to label depth excessive than to confess that they do not dare to meet it. So yes, I have been the woman who stayed awake replaying a sentence, trying to work out where the truth ended and the performance began. I have been the woman who sensed the leaving before the goodbye, who felt the warmth cool by degrees and still hoped I was imagining it. I have been the woman who gave sincerity to people who handled it like it was cheap, who spoke plainly to those who preferred games, who offered consistency to those addicted to confusion because confusion let them keep control. That sort of pain does not simply sting. It humiliates. It sits in your chest and asks how you did not see it sooner. What makes it worse is that the world has the nerve to mock the very people who still believe in real connection. Imagine that. The ones willing to show up, stay honest, and mean what they say are called intense, while the emotionally unavailable are treated like prizes because they know how to withhold affection with style. A man goes silent, grows distant, gives you crumbs, and suddenly he is complicated. Mysterious. Guarded. A woman asks for consistency and truth, and she is dramatic. Clingy. Too serious. What a pathetic little scam. Let us call things by their proper names. He is not mysterious, he is immature. He is not guarded, he is avoidant. He is not complicated, he is inconsistent. And if that sounds harsh, good. Some truths need a colder voice because people have grown far too comfortable dressing selfishness up in soft language. Still, for all my sarcasm, for all the sharpness I have earned, there is grief under it. There is always grief under it. Because I do not become this pointed for no reason. Women like me do not grow steel in our mouths because life was gentle. We grow it because softness was mishandled too many times. Because tenderness was met with delay, vagueness, half-love, and those nauseating almost-commitments people serve up when they want access without responsibility. There is a younger version of me I still ache for, the one who thought honesty would be enough to keep things clean, who believed if she showed up with all she had, the right people would do the same. She did not know yet how many people enjoy the theatre of intimacy while running from the labour of it. She did not know how many would reach for warmth with frozen hands and then resent the fire for asking them to stay. And yes, I am difficult now. I am watchful. I hear the wobble in words. I see the distance before it is announced. I can tell when affection is real and when it is simply loneliness shopping for relief. I do not apologise for that. Pain taught me pattern recognition. Sorrow sharpened my judgement. Every disappointment left a fingerprint, and now I know exactly what it feels like when somebody wants the benefits of my depth without paying the cost of their own honesty. They want my softness, my loyalty, my attention, my fierce way of loving, but they do not want the mirror that comes with it. They do not want to be seen clearly because being seen clearly means they can no longer hide behind charm, timing, or a wounded little backstory. Tragic. Truly. Someone fetch the violin for all these people who want devotion without accountability. But beneath all the bite, I am still painfully tender where it counts. That is the part no one earns the right to joke about. I am still the woman who wants love with substance, love with weight, love that does not disappear the moment life becomes inconvenient. I still want the kind of bond that does not need to be decoded like a riddle written by someone afraid of their own feelings. I want steadiness. I want truth spoken plainly. I want to be looked at by someone who is not impressed by surface-level desire because they understand the gravity of what it means to be chosen properly. I want the kind of love that does not merely visit, but remains. The kind that can sit with fear, silence, grief, doubt, and still say, I am here. Not because it is easy. Because it is real. And maybe that is why this hurts as much as it does. Because no matter how sharp my tongue gets, no matter how well I learn the difference between sincerity and performance, there is still a part of me that believes love should be more than occasional affection and well-timed charm. There is still a part of me that wants to rest in something honest without having to inspect it for cracks. That part of me is not weak. She is exhausted. She is tearful in private and composed in public. She is proud, but not untouched. She is strong, but not numb. She has survived enough to know that being deeply loved is rare, and being deeply understood is rarer still. Yet she still hopes. Imagine that. After all of it, she still hopes. Not blindly. Not foolishly. But stubbornly, like someone holding the last warm thing in a freezing place. So let me be clear. I will never apologise for the scale on which I feel. I will never call my depth a flaw just because lesser people choke on sincerity. I am not too much because I ask for consistency, truth, devotion, and presence. You are simply too little if all you can offer is fascination without effort, desire without discipline, and words without weight. That is not my tragedy. That is yours. Because when someone like me loves, it is not forgettable. It is not light entertainment. It is not a fleeting comfort you replace by next week. It marks you. It reaches places in you that your casual little connections never will. And if you mishandle that, if you fumble something rare because you were too proud, too frightened, or too emotionally cheap to hold it properly, then you do not get to call me intense as you walk away. You call yourself a fool, and you live with it." -Steve De'lano Garcia