Afternoon brooding session number??

For a horrible moment, My fears felt justified. I understood why I kept myself closed off as I stared at the single line of text on the screen of my phone, I understood that I would not have someone the way others do.  There is nothing about my face that would compel someone to want to shelter me besides maybe something pity-evoking about my nervous disposition. I would not have someone to know me truly, deeply, or at the very least not anyone who would care enough to try to. Pain is only compelling when accompanied by beauty; a lesson I've learned harshly again and again, yet I remain tender hearted to the sentiment, hoping foolishly I'd absolve myself of that fate. I wished then that I might be a more jaded person rather than a hurt one, that every reminder did not threaten to shatter me and that my numbness was more than a mask. 

Or maybe that I had a face just a tad more intriguing, less childlike, so that the softness in my eyes might be noticed. 

It was my fault, perhaps I should have anticipated that someone unable to make sense of his own emotions would not understand the landmine of vulnerability within sharing private musings. Maybe worse than the absence of anything is the fact I had revealed myself in vain. I had given someone a glimpse beyond the veil, and there was nothing worth seeing. 

I could have lived with that reality of expecting too much. I could have come to terms with a personal sense of greed  But instead it is simply I am never the one offered tender words. I live another day in a world where I do not seem to exist at all.  I barely feel like a person, an echo of someone who never had the chance to exist, I experience daytime like someone who is dreaming;   somnambulant, waiting to awaken and with only a vague sense of awareness. 

At this moment I sit at the corner side of a cafe and do what I do best. I spectate passersby. My ability to perpetually draw stares yet blend in to any wall suits me in that way, bypassing the need for social camouflage because of a much more literal phenomena. I suppose I cannot complain. I am cloaked, literally. 

I overhear their arguments, their hopes and dreams and fears. I get glimpses of their lives like I am the sole inhabitant of some realm of dream. Some of them skitter away from me in disdain, clutching their children's arms a little tighter when asked "daddy, what is she doing?". others do not mind me. Just a figure in a hoodie, vaguely youngish, hunched over a lap top with a latte. A shade too brown to belong in this town and a bit too off-putting and harshly featured to be called "pretty". I am doomed to recognize the hiddenness within strangers eyes while being seen by none, like a curse enacted on me from a god of the ancient Greeks. And that is why I am afraid to look. I am not the great love of someones life. I am just an onlooker who will write about it from a table at a cafe.