Phones stopped ringing. Invitations stopped coming. People who used to show up without asking suddenly needed notice, then distance, then nothing at all. It wasn’t dramatic. No big arguments. Just absence, spreading slowly until it became the new normal.
At first, I kept waiting for it to reverse.
It didn’t.
Hannah never asked why fewer people came around. She never sat me down and said, “You lost people because of me.” She didn’t carry it like that. She didn’t carry it at all.
She would just show up at my workshop at the end of the day, same as always, holding two cups of tea. Chamomile for her. Black coffee for me.
“You look tired,” she’d say.
And somehow, that would be enough to reset an entire day.
There’s a kind of loneliness people don’t talk about.
