Loneliness Is My Mistress
By a man who finally stopped fighting the silence
Loneliness doesn’t knock. She walks right in.
She’s not dressed in red. No lipstick. No stilettos. She wears yesterday’s grief like a silk robe and smells like old letters you never mailed. And God help me… I love her.
She’s mine.
Mine in a way no woman has ever been.
She doesn’t cheat. She doesn’t ghost.
She haunts.
We’ve grown into each other like a scar into skin. Like smoke into lungs. Like regret into memory. I don’t even remember when she showed up. Maybe after the betrayal. Maybe after the funeral. Maybe the day I stopped expecting the phone to ring.
She finishes my sentences now. Lives in the parentheses of my thoughts. When I lie down at night, she curls up in the hollow of my soul like she was made for it.
She was.
My friends say I’m “resilient.” They say I’ve “got so much to offer.” They want to fix me. Set me up with someone who reads poetry and rescues dogs.
But how do I tell them I already sleep with a ghost?
That I’ve married a silence that knows my every sin and still stays?
She’s better than any woman I’ve ever loved.
She never asks where I’ve been.
She already knows.
She doesn’t need flowers.
She blooms in my emptiness.
And when the rain falls, she weeps for me. Or maybe with me. I’m not sure where her sorrow ends and mine begins.
She never argues. She just stares with hollow eyes, nodding, always nodding.
She knows I’m tired. Knows I don’t want to explain the ache anymore.
When I smile in public, she squeezes my ribs beneath the shirt. “Don’t lie to them,” she whispers.
When I sleep, she tiptoes through my dreams and sings lullabies in the voice of those I’ve lost.
And in the morning, she’s still there.
With coffee.
And quiet.
We are the perfect couple.
No fights.
No lawyers.
No alimony.
Just devotion.
And when death comes, she’ll try to hold me.
But she can’t come.
Not where I’m going.
She’ll reach for my soul like she always has,
but for the first time, I’ll slip through her fingers.
There’ll be no room for her in glory.
No shadow in that light.
And as I rise,
I’ll feel it—
that final tear.
The ripping of a bond I once mistook for love.
She’ll crumble behind me like ashes in the wind.
Maybe she’ll scatter into the soul shards I’ve shed along the way—
fragments of old regrets, whispered lies, half-written apologies.
Maybe she'll be reborn in someone else’s ache.
But not mine.
Not anymore.
Because in the place I’m going—
there are no more tears.
Not even for her.
And that…
is how we say goodbye.