Connections

“I thought people just pretended to feel love.”

is what you’ve just said the first time an adult looks at you like something is off.

Like you’re missing something.

Schoolmates, labpartners, co-workers will look at you the same way every time you tell someone this. So you learn to refrain from doing so. Some you bond with still, most you immediately dislike.

And most importantly, you learn one of the only things you’ll always get wrong.

People do actually feel the grand emotions of love and deep connections popular fiction constantly evolves around. You just don’t.
And the first time you’re asked “have you been diagnosed?”, you turn the topic elsewhere, but return home immediately afterwards to look it up and find something that doesn’t make your stomach churn with shame to connect with your already well developed sense of self, and you latch onto it.

So you go through life, having casual connections that you make sure stay that way. You keep telling yourself this is who you are, and it eventually becomes essential to the way you live.
There’s no real desire to have a close friend, a lover, or a partner.

Although there still remains an itch to have someone to connect properly to, you learn it’s probably best to live without.

My post of this on tumblr!

Appropriative thinky-thoughts on other people's fictional characters. Sorry if it's a sucky headcanon, it's one amongst many of mine for him.
(Also this is the reason I never really got into writing, I'm really not very good at it.)
The piece was fun to draw though!