The Wound Bunker: Are We Dating or Just Looking for Intimate Fallout Shelters?

You didn't need identification to let them in. You needed a name and a last address, and something in you decided that was enough, because you weren't screening for a person. You were screening for coverage. You call them yours. They are a ration. Words of affirmation are the sentence a parent never finished saying to you, and you have been waiting so long for it that you stopped noticing you're the one still saying it, through their mouth, in their voice, so it finally sounds real. Acts of service are muscles you were never taught to grow in your own body, borrowed on a payment plan you call love. Physical touch is somebody else's nervous system doing the job yours was never shown how to do alone. Gifts are proof, because somewhere back there attention only arrived after a performance, and you have been performing for it since before you had the word performance. Quality time is not romance. It's surveillance, because somebody taught you people vanish, and you have never once stopped checking that they haven't. Say whose face you saw the first time somebody got close enough to touch what this whole arrangement exists to guard. You know the face. Say it in your head right now while I'm still talking, because you already did. You are not afraid they leave. You have survived that. You have rehearsed it. What you cannot survive is them staying long enough to watch the thing you built your entire identity around finally have nowhere left to hide. That is the disaster. Not the breakup. The version of you that exists the day nobody has to protect you anymore, because you do not know that version, you have never met them, and some nights you are not sure you want to. Soft life did not rescue you. It just paid somebody else to keep doing what you were supposed to learn to do for yourself, and called the avoidance an upgrade. You built walls before you built a relationship. You staffed them before you loved anyone. You inherited the blueprint before you were old enough to read, from a house, from a voice, from somebody whose mood you learned before you learned your own name, and every person since has been measured against a set of requirements you did not write and have never once questioned out loud. Tonight you question it out loud. Whether you're ready or not. Lines are open. The Voice of Reason starts now.