There is something deeply wrong inside me every time I start getting close to a woman.

Not the kind of wrong that sounds cute. Not the kind people laugh off with, “that is just what having a crush feels like.” It is not that simple, and I think a part of me has always known it.

It feels more like a hole. Empty. Dark. Permanent in a way that nothing ever seems to fully close. And every time someone comes near me, someone who gives me a little attention, asks how my day was, laughs at something I said, makes me feel seen for even a brief moment, that hole suddenly feels like it found air again. I come alive. I light up. Something in me wakes up with a kind of intensity that I cannot explain and cannot control. I get too excited, too quickly. I start hoping too much. I start imagining entire futures out of conversations that probably meant nothing to the other person.

I know it is unhealthy. I know it is too much. I have told myself a hundred times to slow down, to breathe, to act normal. But the feeling always arrives before logic does, and by the time my brain catches up, I am already too far in.

Sometimes it is only a simple conversation, and yet my mind is already running miles ahead of me. I notice the way she types. I count how long it takes her to reply. I replay her words over and over in my head like they carry more weight than they probably do. I pay attention to small things. The way she laughs. The specific words she chooses. Whether she remembers something I mentioned days ago. One small moment of warmth from her can genuinely change my entire day. One shift in her tone, one reply that feels a little colder than usual, and I am already sitting with this anxious ache in my chest wondering what I did wrong.

And the worst part is not even the obsession itself.

The worst part is that somewhere underneath all of it, I know. I know exactly what I am doing. I watch myself from the inside doing it, and I still cannot stop.

What exhausts me most is knowing that maybe none of this was ever really love.

Maybe I was only pouring the emptiness in my chest into someone who never asked to carry it. Maybe I was using her warmth to fill a room inside me that has been dark for so long I stopped remembering when the lights went out.

Maybe that is why everything always feels so disproportionately huge to me. Because I never really approach anyone with a full heart. I come to them with hunger. I come to them with something hollow rattling around inside me that I keep trying to hand off to someone else. I come to them like a person secretly hoping that another person can fill a shape they do not even understand themselves. And the cruel irony is that no one can. No one ever can. But I keep trying anyway, again and again, like I am convinced that one day someone will finally be the right fit.

So when a woman appears in my life, even for a little while, I do not always see her as she truly is.

I see possibility.
I see warmth.
I see home.
I see medicine.
I see answer.

I project everything onto her. All the things I have been quietly aching for, all the comfort I never learned how to give myself, all the stability I have been searching for in the wrong places. I wrap all of it around her before she has even had the chance to simply be a person in front of me.

And that is where everything begins to rot.

Because no human being deserves to be turned into a cure for wounds they did not create. No one should have to walk into someone else’s life and immediately become responsible for healing damage that was there long before they arrived. But somehow, I keep doing it. I keep placing that weight on people without even realizing I am doing it. I keep believing that maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time someone will stay longer. Maybe this time someone will be patient enough with the noise in my head, gentle enough to quiet something inside me that I cannot even touch myself. Maybe this time someone will look at all of it and not run.

But reality is almost always the same.

I fall too fast. I care too much, too soon. I attach before there is anything solid to attach to. I let someone become the center of things they never agreed to hold. I build an entire world around a person who is still just getting to know my name, and when that world does not match the reality, I collapse under the weight of something I built with my own hands.

And when it all falls apart, I fall apart in ways that feel almost embarrassing. Not because some great love story ended. Not because vows were broken or years of shared history were lost. Sometimes nothing even officially happened. There was no relationship. No defined status. No real promise made under anything that could be called daylight. No bond I could honestly point to and say, this was mine. And yet the pain still arrives like something fundamental has been pulled out of me. It still makes breathing feel slightly harder than it should. It still follows me into the quiet parts of the night when everything goes still and there is nothing left to distract me.

And maybe that is because what I lose is not always her.

Maybe what I lose is the version of her that I built by myself, in my own mind, out of very little material. A few conversations. A few good moments. A specific look she gave me once that I replayed so many times it started to mean something it probably never did.

I have become almost skilled at constructing people who do not exist. I take the fragments of someone real and I fill in all the gaps with everything I have been hoping to find. I write a whole story around a person before they have even finished introducing themselves to me. And when the real person eventually shows up, fully human and complicated and nothing like the version I invented, I do not know how to reconcile the two.

That might be the saddest part of all of this. I have broken my own heart over things that never truly existed. I have sat with real grief over stories that only ever lived inside my head. I have mourned possibilities, not people. I have cried over futures that were never even offered to me, only imagined.

It is exhausting in a way I do not know how to fully articulate.

It is exhausting to look normal on the outside while inside, every single time someone new enters my orbit, I transform into something I barely recognize. Something desperate. Something clutching. Something so relieved to feel a little less alone that it immediately grabs hold and refuses to let go. I become an ocean that was already too full before she ever arrived, and the smallest change in weather is enough to make everything overflow.

I have tried to explain this to people before. The way it feels. The way my chest gets loud when I start liking someone. The way a simple good morning text can make me feel genuinely okay for hours. Most people look at me like I am being dramatic. Like I am exaggerating for effect. And maybe from the outside it really does look that way.

But from the inside, it has never felt like drama. It has always felt like survival.

Sometimes I envy people who know how to like someone quietly. People who can get close without completely losing the thread of themselves. People who can take their time getting to know another person without immediately placing half their soul into hands they barely know. I do not know what that feels like. Every time my heart moves, it moves loudly. It moves with a kind of desperate energy that has never once been calm or simple or easy. I have never been able to like someone softly. It always becomes everything, and then it always becomes wreckage.

And lately, I have started to become afraid of myself.

Not in a dramatic way. Not the kind of fear that makes for a good story. Quiet fear. The kind that shows up in the middle of an ordinary day and just sits there, asking uncomfortable questions I do not want to answer.

Afraid that what I have been calling love all this time was never really love.
Afraid that what I was actually chasing was escape.
Afraid that I do not genuinely want a person, I only cannot tolerate the sound of my own silence.
Afraid that what I have been doing is not connecting with people but using them as furniture to fill an empty room.

Because if any of that is true, then how honest was any of it? How real was any of the feeling I was so convinced was genuine? Was I ever actually falling for someone, or was I just falling and grabbing onto whoever happened to be nearby?

I do not have an answer for that. I have sat with that question for a long time and I still do not have anything clean to say about it.

All I have is the pattern. The same pattern, playing out the same way, every single time. I meet someone. Something wakes up in me that feels like hope. I pour myself into it before it has earned that. I start obsessing over details. I start needing things that were never promised to me. I start believing in something that exists mostly in my imagination. And then, slowly or suddenly, it ends. And I am left alone with myself again. Same room. Same nights. Same silence. Same emptiness sitting quietly at the center of my chest like it never went anywhere at all.

Like all those people were never healing anything.

Like they were only ever delaying the loneliness, not touching it.

Maybe that was the problem from the very beginning.

Maybe my heart was never truly looking for someone else.
Maybe it was panicking.
Panicking because of the quiet.
Panicking because of the empty.
Panicking because it could not stand the sound of its own echo anymore and it needed, desperately, to fill the room with something other than itself.

So every time a woman came into my life, I mistook her for salvation. When maybe she was only a distraction with a name, a voice, a way of making me feel less alone for a little while.

Just a little while.

And then the while ends.

And then all of it comes back.

Same as before.

Empty again.