Tell me, please
do you feel like this with anyone else?
“Is it all in my head? Am I hurting myself?
Do you feel like this with anyone else?” - Sydney Ross Mitchell
There is a question that keeps rising to the surface of my throat, delicate and humiliating.
Do you feel like this with anyone else?
I try to dress it up before I say it. I try to make it casual, almost ironic, like I don’t already know how much the answer matters. I pretend it’s curiosity instead of hunger. But it isn’t. It’s never just curiosity. It’s the quiet, aching need to know if what is happening to me is singular, or if I am just stepping into a role that has already been rehearsed.
If I ask, if I actually let it leave my mouth, there is no answer that won’t cost me something.
If you say no, it doesn’t feel like this with anyone else, then suddenly this becomes real in a way I can’t dilute. I would have to hold it as something chosen. Something that could be lost. Something that will hurt.
But if you say yes, it has felt like this before, it could feel like this again, you move through the world regularly inspiring this kind of devastating ache in people, then that is somehow worse. What am I supposed to do with that information? How am I supposed to survive knowing I have become just another room you once stood in and lit on fire?
Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?
Because I am behaving like a person who has forgotten her own rules. Or maybe worse: like someone who remembers them perfectly and is ignoring them on purpose.
It’s true, I have historically been detached on purpose. I built that detachment carefully, like a house designed to withstand any possible storm. I put windows in it, but they never opened. I decorated it with independence and called it freedom. I invited people inside and said, “Look how comfortable I am here,” as if comfort and safety were the same thing. But really it was just a place engineered to keep everything at a manageable distance. Nothing could get too close. I became fluent in the language of almost. Almost wanting. Almost needing. Almost staying. I am very good at being almost in love.
Usually, I stand slightly to the side of my own life. I narrate. I observe. I keep a small, controllable distance so that nothing can rush me all at once. I know how to turn intensity into something manageable instead of dangerous. I know how to leave before I am left. I know how to make desire feel contained, civilized, survivable.
But then. There’s a then in this one.
I watch you look at me and it feels different. And it’s scary. Not because there is anything overtly frightening about you, but because there is something frightening about what happens to me in your presence.
You listen to me past the point where most people stop listening. You pay attention in a way that feels almost invasive. Like you are carefully collecting pieces of me without announcing it.
My face betrays me. My body betrays me. I am pink and obvious and a little bit dazzled in your presence, which is not a position I typically enjoy being in.
Usually, I am composed. Usually, I know exactly how I am being perceived. I carefully manufactured that version of myself. But around you I become strangely visible to myself. I hear my own laugh getting softer, warmer, less controlled. I catch myself leaning toward you before I realize I’m doing it. My entire body seems to reach for you a half second before my brain can intervene.
This does not feel manageable.
So yes, I am scared.
Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?
Do you touch other people like this? Like they are something both fragile and inevitable. Do your hands learn them slowly, then all at once? Do you notice the places where they tense and soften, the invisible maps beneath their skin? Do you think about them afterward when there is nothing to feel at all? Do you find yourself reaching for the memory of them the way a tongue searches for a missing tooth? Do you carry pieces of them around after they leave?
Or is this new for you too? It can’t be.
Because it is new for me. That is the terrifying thing.
I am used to desire. Desire is easy. You can manufacture it in a dark room after two drinks and the right mood. I have mistaken attention for intimacy before. I have mistaken being wanted for being seen. But this feels quieter than that. More dangerous because of how much I care.
You make me feel observed in the most precise way. Not consumed. Not conquered. Just noticed.
And I don’t think people understand how disarming that can be.
To be noticed is to lose your camouflage. Suddenly all the little performances stop working. I cannot arrange myself correctly around you. I cannot act detached enough to protect myself from the fact that I wait for your calls with my entire body. That I replay things you’ve said to me while I’m washing dishes, while I’m crossing the street, while I’m trying to fall asleep.
Sometimes I catch myself becoming superstitious about it. I recall our conversations looking for proof. Here, you remembered this. Here, you reached for me first. Here, you looked at me like the room had gone quiet around my body. I inventory your affection like someone preparing for a famine.
Tell me. Is it real?
Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?
Because I already know what happens if you don’t.
If this is singular, if this is rare, then I will have to admit that I want something from you. That I really want something from you. Something with actual weight to it. Not just chemistry. Not just fascination. Something embarrassingly sincere. I will have to admit that when you touch me, something in me goes still in relief. That I am beginning to imagine you in the quiet parts of my life. Your hand at the small of my back in a kitchen. Your face half asleep beside mine. The terrifying intimacy of ordinary tenderness.
It seems that nothing happens for a long time and then suddenly everything happens all at once.
One day you are carefully protecting your solitude, carrying your life alone in both hands like something slightly fragile but mostly manageable, and the next day someone is standing in your doorway in a button-up shirt making your body feel like a live wire. Someone is cradling your face, kissing you in a way that rearranges the architecture of your loneliness. Someone is making you understand why people risk everything for love even when they know exactly how badly it can hurt.
And if this isn’t singular, if this is simply how you move through the world, leaving people dazzled and burning behind you, then I am in more trouble than I thought.
Because I can feel it.
I can feel it happening in real time. The loosening. The softening. The terrifying urge to be known. You are pulling me out from behind the glass I built around myself so carefully, and I don’t even think you realize you’re doing it.
Or maybe you do.
I keep returning to the question, because it is the only place I can still pretend I have control.
Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?
As if the answer might stabilize something in me. As if it might tell me whether I am standing in a pattern or a rupture. As if knowing would change anything at all.
But I am beginning to understand that it won’t.
Because whether this is rare or repeatable, whether I am one of many or something singular, does not change the fact that I am already altered by it.
And so, the question stops being about you.
It becomes something more unsettling. Something turned inward.
Not do you feel like this with anyone else.
But what am I becoming because I feel it with you?
And there is no answer to that.
Only the ongoing, irreversible fact of it.
thank you for reading <3