I don't know when I started looking forward to your posts.
Perhaps it was before I knew I was looking forward to them. Before I began recognizing the little things—the way you phrased a thought, the photographs you chose to share, the moments when you seemed to have something to say but left it unfinished.
Or perhaps it began the first time I realized that I could reply.
Such a small thing, isn't it? A little space beneath your words where mine could exist, too. A place where I could say something to you without having to find a reason to approach you in the world outside that screen.
I wonder if you ever thought about what that space meant to someone like me.
Perhaps not. Perhaps it was only a feature, another way of allowing people to participate in the little world you had made. Perhaps you opened the replies because you liked hearing from people, because you enjoyed a conversation, because there was nothing more to it than that.
I understand.
At least, I tell myself that I do.
Still, there is something peculiar about being given a place to speak to someone without knowing whether you have ever truly been invited into their life.
I could reply to your photograph. I could make a joke about something you wrote. I could tell you that a sentence you shared stayed with me longer than it probably should have. And if you answered, I could answer again.
Just like that, we could have a conversation.
A thread.
A small succession of words, one after another, making a path between two people who might otherwise have remained strangers.
And I think that is what fascinated me most: how easily words could make us closer, and how little that closeness might mean beyond the place where we left them.
I could learn the sound of your thoughts without ever hearing your voice. I could grow familiar with the way you expressed yourself without knowing how you looked at someone when you were trying not to smile. I could spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about a sentence you had probably forgotten writing.
I could become acquainted with the smallest pieces of you that you chose to leave behind.
And still, I would have to admit that I did not know you.
Not really.
There is a distance that exists between two people who have never spoken, and another that exists between two people who have spoken but have nowhere to go from there.
I think the second distance is worse.
Because now there are words to remember. There are moments that can be revisited. There is the dangerous possibility that something has begun, even when neither person has said that it has.
And there is always the question of whether you felt it, too.
Sometimes I wonder whether you ever leave your replies open and wait.
Not necessarily for me. I would never be so presumptuous. Perhaps you wait for someone whose name you already know by heart. Perhaps you wait for a friend, a familiar voice, or simply the pleasant surprise of hearing something thoughtful from a stranger.
Perhaps you don't wait at all.
But I have imagined what it would be like if you did.
If, somewhere between posting a photograph and returning to your day, you wondered whether a particular person would say something. If you checked your notifications without admitting to yourself that you were looking for one name. If you ever wrote something with the quiet hope that someone, somewhere, would understand what you could not bring yourself to say directly.
I have imagined it because I know what it is like to want to say something and then spend the rest of the day pretending that I never wanted to.
It is a strange thing, wanting to be noticed by someone you are afraid to approach.
You begin with harmless intentions. You tell yourself that you simply enjoy their presence, that there is nothing wrong with appreciating someone's photographs or finding their words interesting. You tell yourself that a reply is only a reply, that a conversation is only a conversation.
And perhaps, in the beginning, that is true.
But then you begin to notice the space between their words.
You wonder what they meant. You wonder what they didn't mean. You wonder whether a response was simply polite or whether, for one brief moment, they were as curious about you as you were about them.
You become an expert at asking questions that have no answers.
And the worst part is that no one has done anything wrong.
You have not been promised anything. They have not asked you to wait. No confession has been made, no affection declared, no future imagined aloud.
There is only this small place where your words can meet.
And somehow, it becomes a place you keep returning to.
I think I would like to know you outside of it.
That is the simplest way I can say it, though it took me a long time to understand what I meant.
I would like to know what your voice sounds like when you are tired. What makes you laugh when you aren't trying to be interesting. Whether you speak as thoughtfully as you write, or whether you are wonderfully different when there is no time to revise a sentence before sending it.
I would like to know the things you never post.
Not because I believe that the pieces of yourself you share are somehow insufficient, but because I have begun to understand that a person is always larger than the version of themselves that reaches us.
And you, in particular, have become larger in my imagination than I know how to justify.
Perhaps that is unfair to you.
Perhaps I have taken a handful of words and photographs and built a person around them, someone who might not resemble you at all. Perhaps the distance has allowed me to feel things I would have been too uncertain to feel if I had known you better.
There is safety in wanting someone from afar.
You can be sincere without being exposed. You can be hopeful without having to explain yourself. You can let a feeling grow in the privacy of your own mind, where nothing can contradict it except the occasional reminder that the other person has a life in which you may not occupy any meaningful place.
I know this.
I know how easy it is to mistake the opportunity for a conversation for the promise of a connection.
Still, I cannot quite bring myself to regret the words I have imagined saying to you.
Perhaps that is all this confession is: an acknowledgment that, for a little while, the possibility of speaking to you made the world feel more open.
You gave people a place to leave their words.
I found myself wishing that mine might become familiar to you.
Not extraordinary. Not unforgettable. I never needed to be the most interesting person who replied, or the one whose words made you stop everything you were doing.
I think I only wanted to become someone you recognized.
Someone whose name you could see and think, Oh, it's them.
Someone you might answer not because you felt obliged to, but because you wanted to know what they would say next.
And if that never happened, if I remained only another name among the replies, I suppose I would have to learn how to accept that, too.
Because you never promised me a place in your life.
You only left a little space beneath your words.
And I was the one who began to imagine a world beyond it.
Sometimes, I think about how strange it is that we can be so close to the possibility of someone and still remain impossibly far from the person themselves.
I could send you a message tonight. You might read it tomorrow. You might smile, answer, and give me something to smile about in return.
We might even begin a conversation that lasts longer than either of us expected.
And for a little while, the distance would seem smaller.
But then the conversation would end. We would return to our separate lives, and I would be left wondering whether the words had brought us closer or merely made me more aware of how far apart we were.
I don't know if you have ever wondered about me.
I don't know if you have ever looked at a reply and felt that there might be a person behind it worth knowing.
I don't know if you are waiting for anyone at all.
And perhaps that is why I have not yet found the courage to tell you any of this.
Because the moment I ask, I must be prepared for an answer.
For now, I can live with the uncertainty. I can let your words arrive when they arrive, let mine remain unsent when I cannot think of anything worth saying, and pretend that the distance between us is simply the distance between two people who happen to occupy the same little corner of the internet.
But if I am being honest—and I think a confession ought to begin there—sometimes I wish you knew.
Not everything. Not the hours I have spent thinking about things you probably never intended anyone to think about. Not the conversations I have rehearsed and abandoned, or the number of times I have convinced myself that a simple message would be too much and then wondered whether my silence has made me invisible.
Just this:
That somewhere among the people who read your words, there is someone who has come to look forward to them.
Someone who has wondered what might happen if a reply became a conversation, and a conversation became something neither of you had to invent excuses to continue.
Someone who knows that an open door is not an invitation, that kindness is not a confession, and that being allowed to speak to you does not mean being known by you.
Someone who understands all of that and still, occasionally, hopes.
Perhaps you will never know who I am in this story.
Perhaps you will never know that there was a story at all.
And maybe that is the saddest thing about all these words: they have brought me close enough to imagine you listening, but not close enough to know whether you ever would.
So I will leave this here, in the only place I have ever known how to approach you.
Among the words.
Not as a question you must answer, nor as a feeling you must return.
Only as a confession.
I think I wanted to know you.
And somewhere along the way, without ever really meeting you, I began to wish that you might want to know me, too.