The strange truth is this: I am never less lonely than when I am by myself.

In solitude I can think. I can go still, settle into myself, do something small that belongs only to me. But solitude has its own horizon. There is only so much I can build in the quiet, and my mind always reaches beyond what my hands can hold. I start thinking about bigger things. Things that require time. But I don't have time.

Then the quiet ends.

I return to the people who belong to my life. They need me, they want me, they reach for my time, and I give it, because I want to, because I have to, because that is what love looks like. But in the giving, my plans dissolve. What felt possible in the quiet becomes utopia in the noise. The great things I wanted to build, the versions of myself I wanted to become, they fade. But they don't disappear. They wait.

They pile up.

One after another, year after year. Unfinished intentions stacking into something formless and enormous above me. A cloud. Dense, nameless, growing heavier with every new dream I fold into it. I look up sometimes, trying not to be crushed, and I can't find a thread to pull. Can't see where it begins or ends. Can't untangle any of it.

So the pressure comes down into the small things. Into ordinary days. I feel it in the spaces between moments, in the quiet before sleep. Trapped. Not by walls, but by weight. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Except at night.

At night I close my eyes and I am free. I fly. I have a thousand years and a thousand lives. Every dream I ever abandoned waits for me there, intact, still luminous. In that darkness I build empires, I cross oceans, I become every version of myself I never had time to be. I live in colour. I move without resistance. The weight dissolves and what remains is only possibility, endless and expanding and radiant. For those few hours, I am whole.

And so I start to wonder. What if I spent more time there? What if I let the world go quiet, just a little longer each night? What if I sank deeper into that darkness, stayed a little longer behind my eyes? The wondering becomes a pull. The pull becomes a hunger. I find myself resenting the mornings, the light, the slow return to waking. I want to go back. I want to live inside the dreaming. I want to close the curtains on the world and stop pretending it is enough. The thought grows darker each time I return to it, quiet and persistent, like water finding its way through stone. But it keeps returning. And it keeps growing. And I keep letting it in.

And that is what frightens me most of all.

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