books aren't distant.

It’s hard to say when exactly I realized I was lonely. Maybe it was when I was younger and sat on the edge of the playground, watching other kids laugh and chase each other while I stayed close to the nurse’s office. I was the sickly one, the frail kid with too many doctor's notes and too little stamina. The kind of kid adults looked at with a sad smile and a little too much pity. And the kind of kid other children weren’t quite sure how to treat—fragile, like a doll you weren’t allowed to play too rough with.

Friendships never really bloomed for me. Not for lack of trying. I wanted to be invited, included, seen. But even back then, people—kids and adults alike—kept a kind of distance. Like I might fade out mid-conversation, like I was already halfway gone. I think some part of that followed me into teenhood.

Now that I’m grown, I still feel that same invisible border between me and everyone else. I’m not as sick as I was back then, but I think the image stuck. People are polite. But there’s a hesitation I can’t unsee—like they’re afraid to get too attached. Afraid to invest in someone who might, at any moment, slip away. And so, often, they don’t.

But in the quiet that follows that kind of loneliness, I found books.

Reading started as a way to escape the hospital rooms and long afternoons in bed. Now, it’s how I fill the space where friendships might have lived. Books don’t flinch when you cough too hard. They don’t ask too many questions. They don’t hesitate to get close. A good story can feel more like a conversation than any party I’ve ever been to.

I read everything—novels, essays, poetry, anything that feels like someone else thinking out loud. I suppose, in a way, it’s how I’ve learned to feel less alone. When I read, I get to inhabit someone else’s world, someone else’s body, someone else’s voice. And sometimes, in the spaces between the lines, I catch glimpses of myself reflected back. I find parts of me I didn’t know were missing. Or maybe I find the pieces I thought were too strange or too fragile to matter.

There are days, of course, when the silence is loud. When I ache for someone to talk to—really talk to. Someone who sees the whole of me and doesn’t flinch. But until that day comes, I have stories. I have pages and characters and underlined sentences that make me feel seen. And maybe, just maybe, that’s its own kind of companionship.

Not all of us grow up surrounded by friends. And if you’re reading this and nodding along, just know: you’re not the only one turning pages in solitude. You’re not the only one still here, still reading, still trying to be known—even if just by the stories that never leave.