There You Are

I'll whisper back.

I cannot conversate or be friends with somebody who doesn't emotionally stimulate me and I do not know how to explain it, somewhere along the line I discovered my 'type' in friends and well men or women you never know (mother, I am straight) and I cannot get along with somebody who doesn't understand the why behind certain things no matter how minute, why do you not want to research about a vinyl history and cig ashes from 1965 with me? Why can we not psychoanalyze every album we come across with theories?

I cannot for the life of me sit across someone who talks in smalltalks, who picks their words like grapes and doesn’t eat the stem, who tells me about the weather when there’s a hurricane eating me alive from the inside. I don’t know when it happened, maybe when I was twelve and I realized that silence was only comfortable when it was full of thought and not emptiness, or maybe it was when I first fell in love with a stranger’s mind before I knew the shape of their mouth, but somewhere along the slow, deliberate burn of becoming myself, I discovered that I am absolutely and irreversibly allergic to conversations that do not emotionally rearrange me.

I don’t mean we have to talk about death and God and quantum physics every Tuesday at brunch (though that would be lovely), I mean that I want to feel something when we speak.

I want to leave a conversation with the taste of it in my mouth. I want to remember the exact sentence where your voice cracked and you didn’t know it.

I want to be ruined by someone’s vulnerability, in the most beautiful, non-invasive way. I want to sit on a floor at 3AM with you, surrounded by books we didn’t finish and tea we forgot to drink, and talk about that one time you were five and someone made you feel like your joy was too loud for the room.

If that is too much, I am too much, and we can respectfully walk in opposite directions with no hard feelings. But I will never be able to love you halfway.

I have a type. In friends. In lovers. In humans who feel like stars I once knew before I was born. And this type, oh, it is so precise it almost feels accidental.

They are always the ones who care about the reason behind the thing. The why and the ache and the itch.

They are the people who would pause an album mid-chorus because they suddenly felt like crying, who would rewind a scene from a movie just to watch how the actor blinked. They are not always artists, but they always are.

They might not make anything, but they see everything. And that is enough. That is more than enough.

I do not know how to explain to someone that I cannot breathe in shallow conversations.

It’s not superiority, it’s survival.

Small talk feels like drowning in an inch of water. I need depth. I need someone who gets excited by metaphors and museum plaques.

I need someone who will text me at 2AM to say “Do you think Virginia Woolf was in love with the sea or just wanted to become it?” and then follow it up with a voice note explaining the exact cadence of the thought.

I want the madness.

The intentional madness. Not chaos for the sake of it, but the kind of wildness that comes from feeling too much and knowing it’s not a curse.

Why would we not want to research the history of vinyls and cigarette ashes from 1965 together? Why would we not want to make entire mythologies out of albums and assign deities to track six?

Why would we not light candles and treat every listen like a ritual, like we are priests of our own sacred sadness? Why would we not psychoanalyse a bassline like it’s a love letter disguised as a rhythm?

Do you know how deeply I crave someone who hears a song and says “this sounds like standing in a train station after a fight” instead of “yeah, it’s catchy”? I cannot live like that. I do not know how to.

There are people who speak like rain on a tin roof, who laugh like honey dripping from the edge of a spoon, and I swear to God,

I want to bottle them. I want to carry their thoughts in my pockets. I want to preserve them like pressed flowers in the pages of my life. And then there are people who speak in bullet points, who think emotion is a PowerPoint slide, who laugh on cue and sigh only when prompted, and I cannot do it.

I cannot make myself care about surface-level stability when I am aching for spiritual anarchy.

I have met people who made me want to write again just by being near them.

People whose thoughts were so textured, so unpredictable, that I had to start taking notes.

There was this one boy, let’s call him maybe, because that’s what he felt like, he once told me that the first time he cried as an adult was because of a documentary on jellyfish.

He couldn’t explain it, he just said the way they pulsed through the water made him think about how lonely humans are.

And I knew.

I knew in that moment that he was the kind of person who would destroy me in the most gentle way.

And then there was this girl, electric, terrible, genius. She once said that her dream job was to name nail polish shades based on Greek tragedies.

Like, imagine wearing a dark crimson called “Iphigenia’s Last Dance.”

And I laughed so hard I nearly choked, but underneath the laughter was awe.

Pure, unfiltered awe at the audacity of someone to live that vividly.

These are the people I fall in love with.

Over and over.

Regardless of gender, place, time, or outcome. It is never about romance. It is about that pull. That impossible-to-ignore gravitational force that draws me to minds that make me want to become more honest. More awake. More strange.

I am so tired of dimming myself just to survive the flatness of everyday interactions. I do not want to be palatable.

I do not want to be easy to swallow. I want to be someone’s acquired taste. I want to be someone’s favorite after the third listen. I want to be the friend who ruins you for all other friendships, because now you know what it feels like to be seen all the way through.

I want you to send me screenshots of obscure poetry and say “this reminded me of you.” I want you to walk into my room and say “can I show you a five-minute documentary that changed the way I think about grief?”

I want you to sit on my bed and talk about that one time your voice broke in public and you pretended it didn’t.

I want you to tell me your favorite lie you’ve ever told. I want to know the version of yourself you invented to survive, and I want to meet the real one underneath it.

I want to touch that version and hold it like a delicate animal that trusts me enough not to run.

Sometimes I think about the people I haven’t met yet, the ones whose minds I will one day stumble into like a strange forest, and I ache for them.

I miss them in advance. I dream of them. I think they dream of me too. I think somewhere across the world someone is playing a song and thinking “I wish someone understood why this hurts,” and I want to be that someone.

I want to be the person who hears a song and knows exactly where in your body it bruises.

This is not about romance. It never is.

It’s about resonance.

It’s about the fact that I cannot be near people who do not make me feel like the world just tilted slightly.

I cannot have dinner with people who only talk about parking spaces and grocery prices and their new blender. I need more. I need the marrow.

I need the stories people haven’t told in years. I need someone to lean in and whisper, “do you ever feel like you’re not real unless someone is watching you?” and I’ll say yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and then we can spiral into a conversation about reality and performance and the sacred intimacy of being perceived.

And you know what? I don’t want to apologise for it. For being intense.

For being curious. For being, as they say, “a lot.” Because what is the alternative? Boredom? Detachment? A life of safe conversations and predictable laughter? No. Burn that. I want chaos and meaning and heartbreak and communion. I want spiritual surgery.

I want mind-bending connections and existential revelations over Lifafa and chai aur sutta please.

I want people who collect thoughts like stamps.

I want people who treat questions like prayers.

I want people who still think about that one sentence someone said to them at sixteen and how it shaped their whole goddamn personality. I want people who are willing to be wrong, to be moved, to be changed.

And if that is too much for you, if you think I talk too much or feel too hard or ask too many questions, then I sincerely wish you well, but please, kindly leave me alone.

Because I have finally built a life where I only let the extraordinary in.

I have finally realised that it’s okay to wait for the kind of people who look at the world with reverence and curiosity instead of boredom and control.

And to those people, to the ones who feel like walking novels, who think in essays and dream in documentaries, who love like archeologists digging through the ruins of old wounds, I am waiting for you.

I am building a room for you inside my ribcage. I am lighting a candle every night in case you need a lighthouse. I am writing this, hoping it reaches you across time and algorithms, hoping you feel a jolt in your spine when you read it and whisper, “there you are.”

And I will whisper back.

There you are.