It Must Be Nice to Miss Things

A piece about intensity, nervous systems, and the private envy of people who can just let things go.

Sometimes I think it would be easier if I were not like this.

Not better.

Easier.

Better sounds too clean. Better sounds like a woman on a podcast with white countertops telling you to journal before sunrise and forgive everyone who made you strange.

I am not talking about better.

I am talking about easier.

The kind of easy where you walk into a room and it is just a room.

Not a temperature shift.

Not a study in posture.

Not a quiet little crime scene of who is avoiding who, who laughed half a second late, who is drinking too fast, who said “I’m fine” with the tone of someone standing barefoot on glass.

Just a room.

Walls. Chairs. People. Air.

God, it must be nice.

It must be nice to miss things.

To hear a sentence and not hear the sentence underneath it.

To read a text and not notice the delay, the missing punctuation, the soft little change in rhythm that says something moved. Something closed. Something is now being managed instead of offered.

It must be nice to believe “nothing’s wrong” because someone said nothing’s wrong.

To not remember what someone said three months ago and compare it against what they just said while trying to act normal and eat a sandwich.

I swear, sometimes I envy people who can just be dumb.

Not cruel dumb.

Not reckless dumb.

Not the kind of dumb that drives a truck through other people’s lives and calls it honesty.

I mean innocent dumb.

Soft dumb.

Blessed dumb.

The kind of dumb where you do not feel the need to understand why someone’s energy changed between the doorway and the kitchen.

The kind where you can be loved without inspecting the wrapping for signs of future abandonment.

I have never been that.

Even as a kid, I noticed too much.

The shift in the house before the fight started.

The way an adult’s mood entered the room before their body did.

The difference between tired and angry.

The difference between silence and punishment.

The difference between someone being busy and someone disappearing from you in real time.

No one teaches you that.

You learn it because you have to.

You become fluent in things no one admits are languages.

Tone.

Distance.

Timing.

The way someone exhales before answering.

The way love can still be in the room, but standing farther away than it was yesterday.

And people call that intensity.

They say you read into things.

They tell you to relax.

Which is always funny.

Because relaxing is exactly what you are trying to do.

You would love to be casual.

You would love to shrug and say, “I’m sure it’s fine,” and then actually feel fine.

You would love to sleep after noticing the thing.

You would love to not replay the conversation like security footage from a burglary no one else believes happened.

You would love to be wrong more often.

That is the part nobody understands.

People think intense people want to be right.

No.

We want to be free.

We want the thing we noticed to be nothing.

We want the tone to be random.

We want the distance to be tiredness.

We want the silence to not mean what our body thinks it means.

But the body is an old animal.

It remembers before you do.

It keeps checking the room even after the room has changed.

It keeps reaching for exits in places where nobody has locked the door.

That is the exhausting part.

Not the caring.

Not the loving.

Not the depth.

The inability to unknow.

Once you notice the change, you cannot go back to the version of the room where the change did not exist.

Once you hear the crack in someone’s voice, you cannot pretend the glass is still whole.

You can smile.

You can pass the salt.

You can make the joke.

You can be gorgeous and charming and almost convincing.

But something in you has already left the table.

This is why dumb looks so peaceful from here.

Dumb gets to stay at the table.

Dumb gets dessert.

Dumb thinks the night went well.

Dumb sleeps.

Meanwhile, you are in bed staring at the ceiling, holding a full congressional hearing over a five-second pause.

And yes, you know how ridiculous it sounds.

That makes it worse.

You can see the whole circus.

The clown car.

The emotional subpoenas.

The haunted little PowerPoint titled: Reasons Something Is Probably Wrong.

You would shut it off if you could.

You would walk into the street and hand your intensity to the first calm-looking person you saw.

Here. Take this. I have done enough with it. I am tired.

But then what?

Who would you be without it?

That is the uglier question.

Because the same thing that exhausts you is also the thing that makes you good.

The noticing.

The depth.

The strange precision of your love.

The way you feel when someone is not saying the thing.

The way you remember what matters.

The way you know when a joke is a door.

The way you know when someone is asking to be held without using any of those words.

That is not nothing.

That is not a defect.

It is just expensive.

Being this way costs more.

It costs sleep.

It costs ease.

It costs the fantasy of being low-maintenance.

It costs the ability to pretend surface-level love is enough.

And yes, sometimes it would be easier to be dumb.

To miss the ache.

To miss the exit wound.

To miss the way someone’s “I’m okay” is really a locked door with music playing behind it.

But I do not think I actually want to be dumb.

I think I want rest.

I think I want a life where my nervous system does not have to be the smartest person in the room.

I want people who do not punish me for noticing.

People who do not make me beg for clarity after they made everything blurry.

People who can say, “You’re right. Something was off,” instead of making me feel crazy for having eyes.

I want love that does not require detective work.

Friendship that does not make me feel like a burden for remembering.

Work that does not reward numbness and call it professionalism.

A life where sensitivity is not treated like a leak in the ceiling.

Maybe the goal is not to become less intense.

Maybe the goal is to stop giving your intensity to people who experience being seen as an accusation.

Maybe the goal is to stop calling yourself too much just because some people built their whole personality around being barely there.

Maybe this is the end of one beginning.

The one where you survived by noticing everything.

The one where every room had to be scanned.

Every silence had to be decoded.

Every shift had to become evidence.

Maybe something else gets to start now.

Not a softer version of you.

Not a dumber one.

A freer one.

One who still notices, but does not always kneel before the noticing.

One who can feel the old alarm without making it king.

One who can leave the room when the room asks too much.

You are not dumb.

You are not casual.

You are not built for half-lit rooms and half-said things.

You notice.

You feel.

You remember.

You pick up the knife before anyone admits there is blood.

And yes, that makes life harder.

But it also makes life yours.

A little haunted.

A little gorgeous.

A little impossible to explain to people who think peace means never looking too closely.

Let them have that.

Let them walk through the room and call it a room.

You know better.

Unfortunately.

Beautifully.

Less obediently now.

// Scorpio Veil

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