I Am Lonely

Hello there,

Someone I’ve never met. Today, I feel really down. Could you pause for a moment and listen to me? Right now, I just want to cry, to collapse—I don’t want to get back up anymore.

Could I borrow your shoulder for a while? I’m so tired…

You ask why I’m tired?

Because the world out there is too overwhelming! I no longer know where I belong. I feel so isolated, so alone.

You know what? Everyone’s moving so fast, and I just can’t keep up.

Maybe it’s just because I’m too slow—that’s why I keep falling behind.

You think I haven’t tried?

I’ve truly put in a lot of effort. They finish their work quickly and go home early.

As for me, I work slower, so I try to stay overtime to make up for it.

You know, a lot of people dislike me at work.

You ask what I do to be disliked?

I work in quality control. You know how frustrating it is when you buy something and it turns out defective, right?

My job is to inspect those products. The good ones go into storage to await shipping. The faulty ones, I send back to the production team for rework.

And that rework takes time—something most workers don’t like.

If there are just a few issues, it’s no big deal. But when there are a lot, I have to write a report to upper management.

When that happens, they lose their bonuses.

But if I don’t report it, we’ll be held responsible. The pressure from this job is overwhelming.

No one really understands what we go through.

There are times I feel like collapsing from the stress, like crying my heart out.

In moments like those, I just wish someone could lend me a shoulder to lean on, or give me a hug and say a kind word.

But when I look around, there’s no one. Not family, not friends, not even casual acquaintances—no one truly understands me.

They always compare me to others:

“That person earns more,” or “This one’s got a higher salary…”

But they don’t see that everything comes with a price.

A high salary is always exchanged for something else in return—nothing is ever free.

You know, sometimes I just want to cry, really cry, and let out all the pain I’ve been bottling up.

But I’m scared.

Scared people will look at me with pity, or worse—with disdain.

So I force myself to be strong, to be resilient.

But deep down, I’m weak—just like a climbing vine with nothing to cling to. Without support, I fall. I can’t stand on my owner.

I’m so useless, aren’t I… stranger?

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