I struggle to talk to people. Not in the sense of having nothing to say. In the sense that I cannot reliably predict what a sentence of mine will do once it leaves me.
Something goes wrong in a conversation. I do not always know what. A word lands differently than I meant it, or I answer a question more precisely than it was asked, or I say the true thing at the wrong moment.
In most descriptions of friendship, this is where something begins. One person says that hurt, the other says I did not mean it that way, and it gets repaired. Repair is supposed to be the ordinary case.
What happens instead is that the person is gone. Not gradually. Blocked, everywhere, at once, with no sentence explaining it. The conversation does not end. It is deleted.
For years I looked for the setting that works. Warm is too much, too intense, too nice. Pulled back is cold. Direct is rude. Asking what went wrong is itself read as an accusation. Every correction points the opposite way from the last one, and after enough rounds that tells you something plain: the setting was never the variable.
So this is not a story about being disliked. It is that leaving has become frictionless while repair was never built. Blocking takes one second, needs no explanation, is available to everyone at all times, and is total. There is no version of it that leaves a door open.
For most people that costs little, because most of their conversations do not go wrong to begin with. Misreadings happen to me more often, so I need the repair channel more often, and that is precisely the channel that no longer exists.
What follows is not loneliness in the ordinary sense. It is that every exchange carries a risk that cannot be insured against, and no history of good faith carries forward. Many beginnings, no continuations.
I write this down because it is part of the record.