I am done with love

For months I have been circling something I did not wish to name. Each time I tried to look at it directly, it slipped aside, adopting a safer shape: fatigue, disappointment, a passing corrosion of the spirit. I told myself it would resolve, that whatever this unease was, it belonged to a season and would eventually pass. It did not. It waited. It learned my habits. It stood just beyond my vision, patient, until recently, when it finally allowed itself to be seen.

I am done with love. Or rather, because accuracy matters here, I am done with the kindness that is born from it.

Not the advertised kind. Not the civic or ceremonial version, performed for witnesses and rewarded with approval. I mean the private kindness, the one that works in silence. The kindness that expresses itself as vigilance, as restraint, as a steady readiness to give without being asked. The kindness that takes the form of devotion while refusing the name. It is this I have lived by, and it is this that has brought me, finally, to exhaustion.

Once, I loved someone so completely that my life began to rearrange itself around her without effort or fear. The future opened and made room. There was nothing I would not have changed, nothing I would not have left behind. This was not sacrifice; it was recognition. I had found the correct shape of my life and stepped into it gladly.

Then she died.

Death, when it arrives, does not merely remove a person. It invalidates a version of the world. In the aftermath, I felt the dark begin its slow, insinuating advance, and I refused it. Refusal felt like loyalty. I believed that to surrender to grief would be to betray what we had been. So I chose motion. I chose usefulness. I chose to remain awake in a world that had lost its organising principle.

Kindness became my method of survival.

I learned to watch carefully, to anticipate needs, to stand just behind others as they moved through their lives. I learned to be dependable, calm, present. I did not ask for much, only a place, only acknowledgment but even this felt, at the time, like too great a demand. I told myself that love had taught me this posture, and that there was honour in maintaining it.

What I failed to understand was how easily this form of kindness becomes consumable.

People are remarkably adept at recognising those who will not resist being taken from. They sense it instinctively, as animals do. Availability announces itself. Devotion without demand is read not as generosity but as permission. Was I a pawn in their game of chess? quietly, efficiently, moved into position when needed, forgotten when not. I became a function rather than a presence, a solution rather than a life.

There was a moment, small, almost negligible hat revealed this with terrible clarity. I once kept watch over someone I valued because they were afraid. Fear alters the air around a person; it makes them unsteady, porous. I stepped into that space without being asked, stood where I thought I belonged, vigilant and silent. What I carried away from that vigil was not gratitude or recognition, but the dull, enduring ache of being unacknowledged. Not rejected, rejection would have had the mercy of finality, just simply unseen.

Later came the remark, offered without malice, without hesitation: I have no friends.

It landed with the force of a truth spoken too carelessly to be kind. In that instant, I understood my position perfectly. Devotion does not guarantee inclusion. One may give time, attention, steadiness, even protection, and still not be counted. I was present, but I was not placed. Near, but unnamed. Useful, but unheld.

I did not correct the record. Kindness rarely does. Instead, I absorbed the sentence and what it implied. I carried it quietly, as I had carried so much else. Only later did I recognise the deeper injury: that I had mistaken endurance for intimacy, and service for love.

This is the exhaustion I have been circling. Not heartbreak, but erosion. The slow wearing away of the self under the guise of virtue. There is something profoundly corrosive about being valued only for what one will absorb, what one will forgive, what one will continue to give after being diminished. It teaches a person to disappear politely.

This is what I have learned, and there is no redemption in it. Love did not save me; kindness did not ennoble me. They thinned me, quietly, until there was less and less to give, and still I gave. I was not misunderstood, I was correctly read. I offered endurance, and the world accepted it without question. What remains now is not hope, or clarity, or even bitterness, but a hard, unsentimental refusal. I will no longer stand guard over lives in which I do not exist. I will no longer mistake my capacity to endure for virtue. If this makes me colder, so be it. Cold is preferable to erasure.