The Strangers
Some don’t fall for love at all.They settle into its shadow,a place where loneliness feelseasier to bear when shared.What begins as a casual dance,a filling of empty hours,grows roots in silence.Not affection,but a strange inertia that binds them,as if the absence of dislikeis enough to pass for care.They lie side by side,facing opposite walls,breathing through the quiet—because to say “I don’t love you”would tear open what little they’ve built.The laughter is muted,the arguments dull.They don’t ache for each other,and yet,they stay.For some, presence alone becomes a comfort.To have someone—anyone—is proof they are still seen,still desired enough to not disappear entirely.And so they walk side by side,strangers in step,navigating a lifeneither of them wantsbut neither will leave.Perhaps it is fear—of silence too loud to bear,of nights spent only with themselves.Perhaps it is habit—the human way of holding on,even when the grip bruises the skin.They endure,not out of passion,but because leavingfeels like work,and stayingfeels like less.What they lose is harder to measure—not a heartbreak,not a tragedy,but the slow erosion of meaning,the quiet death of longing.And when it ends,it does not shatter.It dissolves.A dull conclusion to a storythat was never written in full.Yet they look back,somehow still haunted—not by love,but by the hollowness of its absence.For even empty spacescan leave their scars.
johnthegriot.com/poems/the-strangers