someone filming their day — folding something, showing us around. nothing crazy. just small things done with care. one clip, then another, then another. it was a way to fill quiet hours. but slowly, it became a routine. checking for new posts before bed. watching the same moments replayed in different light. different jeans. the small details began to matter. it always felt like winter, even when it wasn’t.

maybe it was, after all.

those details started to shape me too. i would catch myself picking clothes, foods, even ways of speaking that felt closer to theirs. as if aligning my life with what I imagined was theirs might make mine feel steadier. i began making choices based on what i imagined their normal looked like. again and again, same light, same people, different day. it was like pressing replay on a memory that never belonged to me.

and somewhere in between something shifted. i started to care. not in a way you care about someone you know, but in the way you hold on to a feeling that steadies you. There was something consoling about this — more the sense that life could look like that. purposefulみたいな. i wanted my days to feel like that too — quiet, meaningful and pretty. like the kind of quiet that hums underneath a song you can’t turn off. something soft but unshakable. but it wasn’t just admiration anymore; it became a measure. a standard. this new pace was going to be my pace. even where it didn’t fit me.

then came the other feeling — the quiet comparison, almost surveillance. the kind that creeps in without asking. smiling with friends — and i would feel that sharp, familiar ache of not being enough. not being enough in a generational sense. i started to shrink myself into the outline of who i thought i should be. i blurred. i would think, what would they do? what would look right next to their world? it was very subtle, but it seeped into everything.

I would start measuring my own days against moments that weren't even mine. it's strange, how a person you've never met can take up space in your thoughts. how their world, or, the version they show of it, can feel closer than your own. that distance becomes both comforting and impossible.

sometimes I would catch myself scrolling too far back, through old posts, through moments that had already passed. sometimes the distance felt like snow between us — cold but clean. I could almost convince myself they could see me watching. i'd feel like a ghost in someone else's timeline. watching life unfold from the outside. i would feel silence when they stopped posting for a while. something was missing. even though I was not owed anything. maybe that’s what it means to stay in the middle, not close enough to touch, not far enough to forget.

sooner I realised how fragile the connection was. how easy is it to mistake familiarity for closeness. how what feels mutual can exist entirely one-sided. i shaped parts of my life around someone who never asked to hold that space. and then i realised it, i did not know whether to feel foolish or grateful. maybe both. i still see stuff occasionally, through that same light. but it feels more like a playback now — a past life running quietly in the background. i watch for a moment, then let it fade. maybe that’s all it ever was — staying somewhere in the middle.