Soft Focus.

Love, from afar.

There’s a particular species of loneliness that thrives on the internet—one that doesn’t announce itself as lack but as desire, quiet and pressing. I’ve been thinking about this lately, the way a crush can bloom in the margins of a Substack newsletter, a stranger’s sentences becoming, over time, as familiar as your own thoughts. You learn the cadences of their prose, the gentle elliptical turns of phrase. You can predict when they’ll post, the time of day, the rhythm of their attention.

I’m not proud of it exactly, this attachment. But I’m not ashamed either. It’s only human to reach out, even if the reaching is silent, even if it amounts to no more than watching someone think out loud, week after week.

What does it mean to have a crush on a voice? On a mind distilled through pixels and screen light, coming to you from a flat in Brooklyn or Berlin or who-knows-where. You don’t know their face exactly, or if you do, it’s carefully staged, cropped just so. And yet you feel a jolt when they mention a book you love, a neighbourhood you used to live in, a sadness you recognise. It feels like they’re writing to you, just to you. Loneliness makes everything feel personal. Or maybe it’s the other way around: the illusion of intimacy is the new loneliness.

I once read that reading letters aloud to no one is a way to summon ghosts. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing, scrolling through the long monologues of others: conjuring company, making hauntings out of hunger. When I read their newsletter, I imagine us in a kitchen. I pass them a cup of tea. I say, “Yes, I thought that too.” We don’t touch. We don’t have to.

There’s a sweetness to it, this crush. It doesn’t ask for much—no logistics, no messy logistics of bodies or plans. Just the quiet thrum of recognition, beamed across the ether. A pulse, a ping, the kind of connection that flickers just enough to keep you warm at night.

Sometimes I wonder if they know. Not me, exactly, but the chorus of me’s, the invisible congregation hanging on their every word. Do they feel it, that low hum of devotion? Or are they just talking into the void, hoping, like the rest of us, that someone out there is listening?