reading room
Unassigned
There's so much love inside me— but who is it for?
It doesn't arrive as tenderness. It arrives as pressure— a sentence forming faster than etiquette can intervene, my mouth already saying I love you before my mind has checked whether that's allowed.
Sometimes it is a person. A laugh on a Discord call, a pause where no one rushes to fill the silence, a kindness that lands with no intention of being important. The phrase escapes me like a reflex test I didn't consent to.
Sometimes it is not a person at all. Just the sensation— static without a source, a warmth that isn't gentle, a memory misfiring and hitting someone who no longer exists except as atmosphere.
What am I meant to do with this surplus?
I have tried and failed to swallow it.
Love moves through me like a system doing its job too well, converting laughter into devotion, gratitude into something people flinch back from, leaving me on read without explanation, calling it boundaries. I try smaller words— thank you, I appreciate you— but they come out underpowered, spoken at half the voltage my body is running on.
I don't mean permanence. I don't mean ownership. I don't mean romance, or sex, or the slow architecture of a future.
I mean: this reached me— and I didn't look away.
They say love should be directed, aimed, spent carefully. Kept in labelled containers, away from heat. No one tells you what happens when it's ambient. When it leaks into friendships, ruins the mood, makes sincerity feel suspicious.
I have lost people this way. Not dramatically. Just quietly— the way you lose objects you were holding too tightly without realising.
Sometimes I think this love is not a message at all but a condition— not for anyone, not about anyone, just the way my nervous system reacts to meaning before it asks permission.
A girl finding herself and realising he volume knob was never installed.
If this love has nowhere to go, maybe that's the point. Maybe it doesn't need a subject to be real.
There's so much love inside me— unassigned, relentless, uncontained, awake.
If it doesn't belong to you, or to anyone, maybe that doesn't make it wasted.
Maybe it belongs to attention. To survival.
To the simple, dangerous fact that I am here, and the world keeps reaching me— and I keep responding
— Lilith