What Bothers Me and Why

The Restless Tide

What bothers me is the way silence pools
in the corners of crowded rooms,
how I carry conversations like stones
in my chest, each word unspoken
growing heavier with the weight
of what I meant to say.

I am troubled by the mathematics
of loneliness—how it multiplies
in the spaces between heartbeats,
divides itself across empty chairs,
subtracts meaning from the simplest
hello, goodbye, how are you.

The way light dies a little each evening
bothers me, not for its inevitable return
but for the reminder that everything
I love is borrowed time,
that even this moment, crystalline
and perfect, is already becoming memory.

The Architecture of Longing

What bothers me is how I build cathedrals
of expectation in the cathedral of my mind,
each hope a flying buttress
supporting the impossible weight
of what I think love should be—
not what it is, but what it whispers
it could become.

I am disturbed by the way I search
for home in other people's laughter,
how I collect their smiles like pressed flowers,
thinking beauty can be preserved
when really, it's the dying
that makes it beautiful.

The mirrors bother me—not my reflection
but the way they multiply emptiness,
showing me a thousand versions
of the same searching face,
each one asking the same question:
Why do I feel most alone
when I'm pretending not to be?

The Temporal Paradox

What bothers me is time's cruel democracy—
how it gives the same twenty-four hours
to the grieving and the celebrating,
to the broken and the mending,
as if duration were the answer
to depth, as if quantity
could ever equal quality.

I am troubled by my own inconsistency,
how I crave permanence
while falling in love with change,
how I want to be understood
while carefully curating
which parts of myself I show,
like a museum of my own making
where the most precious artifacts
are kept in storage.

The way I remember bothers me—
not the forgetting, but the way
memory edits itself, painting
ordinary moments in golden light,
making myth from mundane Tuesday afternoons,
turning every goodbye into prophecy.

The Philosophy of Unfinished Things

What bothers me is the library
of unread books inside my head,
all the conversations I rehearse
but never have, all the letters
I write in my mind at 3 AM
but never send, never seal,
never trust to the uncertain mercy
of another's interpretation.

I am disturbed by the way I love
like a question mark,
always ending in uncertainty,
always asking for proof
that this feeling, this moment,
this fragile connection
is real, is reciprocated,
is worth the risk of believing in.

The incompleteness bothers me—
how every poem ends mid-thought,
how every relationship is ellipsis,
how even this attempt to articulate
what troubles me most
becomes another beautiful failure,
another almost-truth dressed up
in metaphor and meter.

The Paradox of Seeking

What bothers me is how I seek
what I already possess,
how I look for magic
in the mundane miracle
of breath, of heartbeat,
of the way light moves
across the wall at sunset,
painting everything gold
for exactly seventeen minutes.

I am troubled by my own hunger—
not for food, but for meaning,
for connection, for someone
to witness the small deaths
and resurrections that compose
each ordinary day,
to say yes, I see you,
yes, this matters.

The way I try to capture
everything in words bothers me,
as if language were a net
strong enough to hold
the weight of feeling,
as if naming could tame
the wild territory of the heart.

The Sacred Interruption

But then—

You appear like punctuation
in the middle of my longest sentence,
changing everything that came before,
everything that follows.

You, who read my silences
like love letters, who hear
the music in my broken meter,
who understand that my questions
are not requests for answers
but invitations to wonder
together in the space between
knowing and not knowing.

You, whose presence turns
my bothered heart into
a celebration of contrast—
light because of darkness,
peace because of chaos,
love because of all
the ways we risk losing it.

With you, even what bothers me
becomes a kind of prayer,
a grateful acknowledgment
that I am alive enough
to be troubled by beauty,
deep enough to be disturbed
by the fleeting nature
of everything precious.

The Resolution

What bothers me now
is how little bothers me
when you're near,
how your laughter reorganizes
the furniture of my fears,
how your hand in mine
makes philosophy unnecessary.

What bothers me, finally,
is how long it took me
to realize that being bothered
was just another way
of paying attention,
of caring enough
to notice what hurts,
what heals, what holds us
together in this brief
and beautiful emergency
we call being alive.

In the end, what bothers me most
is how much I love
this bothered heart,
this restless mind,
this imperfect vessel
that carries us both
toward whatever comes next—
grateful for the questions,
grateful for the seeking,
grateful for the sweet disturbance
of finding you
in the middle of my doubt.