I don't understand how to connect to people.
I get too excited and manic and I come off obnoxious, a storm of buoyant energy. I'm excited, because I desperately, utterly desperately want someone to connect with me on my terms. I am the living embodiment of a 3am text.
I could stay alive for days, sustained only on the way someones eyes delight in an anecdote I've provided. I'll hold onto that, I'll turn it into bad behavior. I weave toxicity and obsession like it's my actual job and romanticize and fetishize the spell I've woven and destroyed with the same prowess.
I try to connect with people on their terms, and sometimes it works. Some people are the same way as me and they understand my messages in all caps and 4 am with links to dogs in bow ties. Some people understand that I've terrible at being alone, that I fall in love with my own sadness or the terrible beauty of the world around me and understand that I'm broken and that healing is hard.
I want to connect with people whose own darkness I can sense. I want to coax their hurting out of them like poison from a wound. I want to share their monsters and their pain. I want to lay in the dark with the horror of life and the bleakness and know that nothing has ever been as poignant or beautiful or horrifying as that moment.
I want to take away someones demons, to collect them into myself and play with them in the dark. I understand sorrow, I understand the sorrow of others.
Very few people want to know the sad girl at 4 am who is using anything, absolutely anything, to start a conversation. Most just want to see what they want.
I'm a static whiteness. I am a blank slate for others to project upon me.