There's a version of you that exists only when other people are watching. The one who has something to say at the right moment, who laughs at the right time, who seems easy to be around. When you stop seeing people regularly, that version gets rusty. You forget what to do with your hands.

Loneliness doesn't announce itself loudly at first. It sneaks in through the math. You stop counting days since you last had a real conversation and start counting hours. You eat dinner at slightly stranger times. Your sense of what's a reasonable amount of time to spend alone expands in a way that feels fine until suddenly it doesn't.

The hard part isn't the quiet — it's that the quiet starts to feel like information. Like the world running a small test to see if anyone notices you're gone. And then you do this thing where you start interpreting the absence as verdict. If no one called, maybe there's a reason. If it's been two weeks since someone checked in, maybe two weeks is how long people go before they stop thinking about you.

None of that is actually true. But loneliness is extremely convincing.

What's actually happening is simpler: people are busy, patterns get interrupted, proximity drives most connection. When you're not physically near your people, you fall out of their daily visibility, not their care. The math you're doing isn't wrong because you're unwanted. It's wrong because loneliness is doing the arithmetic.