There is a quiet cruelty in caring too deeply for someone who does not see you—not for who you are, not for what you’ve tried to be, but only for the inconvenience of your presence. You lose yourself slowly, piece by piece, in the gravity of their importance. A word from them, even carelessly spoken, becomes the measure of your worth. A glance in your direction, even indifferent, becomes enough to brighten or break your day. And yet, to them, you are nothing but an interruption. A voice they do not want to hear, a figure they would rather not notice. You pour your kindness in steady streams, thinking it might carve a place in their heart, but it only gathers as silence between you. They do not see the decency, the restraint, the quiet ways you choose respect over desire. All they see is someone they wish would step further back, someone whose absence would make the air lighter. The weight of that realization is suffocating. You wake each morning with the thought of them as a reason to move forward, while for them, the thought of you is a reason to recoil. You hoped to be a source of warmth; instead, you’ve become a shadow they shrink from. And in the end, the hardest truth to accept is not that they do not love you—it is that they do not even wish to know you. That all the fragments of yourself you’ve surrendered so willingly were never asked for, never desired, never even noticed. Losing yourself for them feels like devotion. But to them, it is only noise.