Some never disappear.
They were engineered
to be unreachable from the beginning.
They arrive as schematics—
impressive, exacting,
nonparticipatory.
To be near them
is to inhabit a diagram:
lines, limits, the illusion of entry.
They cast no shadow
because they refuse to be dimensional.
They are not withholding affection—
they are withholding ontology.
Presence, only insofar as it does not require
response.
They calibrate your voice
to suit their thresholds.
They reward your reduction
with civility.
They mirror your ache
with silence—
a systematized refusal
to metabolize anything real.
Not stoicism.
A practiced withholding.
Disconnection, made elegant—
sold as stability.
They do not engage
because engagement risks implication.
To respond
would be to be changed—
and they have chosen
inviolability.
You adapt.
You refine your proximity.
You manage your intensity
like a diplomat in a closed room—
negotiating against absence
in fluent restraint.
They call this dynamic mutual.
They call themselves balanced.
They are not balanced.
They are nonreactive by design—
a sealed system
that calls your pulse invasive.
And when the consequence arrives—
when meaning can no longer survive
within the parameters they permit—
they do not recoil.
They simply do not register
your implosion
as data.
They do not flee.
They remain inert.
Which is more efficient,
and more enduring.
And history,
if it dares to remember,
will say they were composed.
That they caused no harm.
That their silence
was a kind of peace.
But you—
you will know.
You will remember
that you were asked to vanish
without ever being touched.
H.M. Stefanec
@reveriesinred
