Once I believed in love with the solemn obedience of a young man who has not yet been summoned before the tribunal of his own heart. In those days I treated love like a decree written somewhere in the invisible offices of existence—inevitable, binding, unquestionable. Later, with the embarrassed intelligence that arrives only after certain humiliations, I adopted another doctrine: that a man proves himself not by loving deeply but by loving often. Having many girls, I concluded, was a kind of masculine credential, a stamped document presented at the counter of adulthood.

It sounded persuasive when spoken aloud. Almost official.

So I attempted—quite deliberately—to feel what others seemed to experience so easily. I waited for it as one waits for an appointment that must surely have been scheduled, though the clerk cannot locate the record. I searched inside myself the way a man searches his pockets for a name he has forgotten but knows must be written somewhere.

But nothing came.

My heart behaved like a bureaucratic office after hours—lamps dim, desks empty, papers unmoved. Every petition for feeling was returned unsigned.

Then there was another girl who entered my life without ceremony. People said such things happen naturally, that feelings grow the way grass grows—quietly, inevitably. Yet when I looked within myself there was only the peculiar sensation of drifting, as if I were a small paper boat set upon a river whose current had already chosen the direction long before I arrived.

Then came the wound. And here, if I may confess something unpleasant, the wound did not come from romance. Romance would have been easier to explain. No—it came from friendship.

From a brother who was not my brother by blood, yet whom I had chosen in that rare and reckless way men sometimes choose each other. They say blood is thicker than water. Perhaps. But I learned something stranger: a bond made not by blood but by decision can stretch like rubber between two people for years, surviving weight and silence and distance—until one day it snaps.

And when it snaps, there is no ritual for it.

No one knows what to say to a man who has lost a brother he was never officially allowed to have.

After that fracture a quiet illness entered my life—an illness with no document, no diagnosis, no formal recognition. I discovered something that frightened me: depression is not sadness. Sadness is loud, dramatic, full of movement. Depression is quieter. It is the mind speaking in a tired administrative voice:

I am tired of performing this character.

It asks for a rest so deep that even the self must temporarily resign.

And yet the world continues. The body wakes, dresses, works, answers the telephone, listens to other people’s complaints, solves their small emergencies, offers calm words like a professional caretaker of other lives. Only at night, in the silent corridors of the mind, does one realize that wanting itself has quietly gone offline.

It was around this time that I revised my philosophy.

Love, I decided, is a human error.

Not an insult—merely an observation. Human beings cannot determine with any reliability what true love is. We mistake patterns for feelings, projections for intimacy, coincidence for destiny. We label several incompatible sensations with the same word and later wonder why the equation refuses to balance.

So I abandoned the search for love and began searching instead for perfection.

I designed, quietly and carefully, the outline of a “perfect person,” as if the heart could be solved through architecture. And one day such a person appeared. She matched the description with alarming accuracy. Naturally, I pursued her.

She confessed, gently, that she had once felt something for me.

Past tense.

And I sat there with the unpleasant realization that I had nothing corresponding to offer. Not cruelty—simply absence. The emotion required for that moment had been compressed long ago, packed down beneath strategy and observation and the quiet habit of drifting with the current.

I admired her perfection.

But admiration is not love.

What followed is something I confess with shame. I discovered how easily hearts can be influenced. If someone hated betrayal, I simply made them believe they were attached to me in some harmless way. They thought they held my hand. In truth they were only holding the strings I had placed there.

Even when someone flirted with me, my mind did not flutter as others described. I felt no butterflies, no foolish warmth—only curiosity, like an analyst observing a curious move on a chessboard.

Why did she choose that gesture?

Little by little, people stopped appearing to me as companions and began to resemble pieces in a game whose rules I alone was studying.

This arrangement explained everything.

And therefore, naturally, it justified everything.

Until someone arrived who did not move like a piece at all.

She did not enter through the wide, well-lit door I had constructed for such encounters—the door with measured distances and careful angles, the door where I could observe safely.

She did not use that door.

It was as though she carried a key to something older, something that existed before I even installed the lock.

Before the strategies.

Before the glass walls.

Before I learned to treat people like objects of calculation.

I do not understand it. She does nothing extraordinary. She simply exists in that quiet, unperformed way certain people possess. And yet when she is present, a strange thing happens inside me: the rooms that are usually sealed remain open.

Ordinarily when someone asks about my past I feel a silent alarm within me. Walls rise automatically. Distances appear. A carefully managed version of myself steps forward to answer questions the real one refuses to approach.

But with her the mechanism fails.

The walls do not rise.

The door simply remains open, as though it had been waiting for her long before I understood there was a door at all.

I insist—stubbornly, perhaps defensively—that I am not in love. I know love’s counterfeits intimately; I have manufactured them myself. I have distributed them. I recognize the machinery.

This does not feel manufactured.

But neither do I understand what it is.

What I know is only this:

When I sleep, she appears.

Not invited. Not constructed. Simply present—like music that was already playing before one entered the room.

Sometimes even in the shallow sleep of an afternoon nap.

I wake slowly, the dream dissolving, and lie there in the returning silence with a question that feels embarrassingly sincere, almost childish in its honesty:

Is this the feeling?

And each time the same thought follows, quiet and unresolved—

Am I discovering love for the first time,

or have I simply grown so exhausted from standing alone in my own mind

that at last,

without noticing,

Have I fallen?