I crave love like a hunger I’m embarrassed to admit, like asking for water while insisting I don’t deserve the glass. I tell myself I am too much in the wrong ways and not enough in the right ones, too childish to be steady, too practical to be gentle, too quiet to know the right words when someone else is breaking. I imagine her pain and already see myself failing it. My hands, empty. My logic, sharp. My comfort, clumsy. So I step back before I can ruin something sacred. I say love deserves better than me, as if that makes me noble, as if self-rejection is kindness and not fear wearing good manners. I practice being alone like it’s a discipline. Career. Money. Growth. Things that don’t ask me why I go silent or why I flinch at closeness or why I love simply in a world that wants complexity. People leave. Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just enough times that absence starts to feel like evidence. And so I become careful. I call it maturity. I call it realism. But really, it is a child inside me learning how to disappear before being abandoned again. Still, still I want love. Not fireworks. Not rescue. Just someone who stays when I am quiet, someone who doesn’t confuse my slowness for lack of depth, someone who understands that my heart speaks softly because it has learned what shouting costs. I don’t think I’m unlovable. I think I am fragile in a way the world hasn’t handled gently yet. And maybe that’s why I ache. Not because I am broken, but because somewhere in me there is so much love, waiting to be met without being proven first.