“The awareness of how fundamentally limited your senses are."

As an autistic person, it always feels like I’m never quite in-sync with the rest of the world. It’s like playing a game that you only know most of the rules to, but not all. My emotional range always feeling like it’s missing the latest patch. A pretty-good-but-not-quite human.

It’s especially true when people tell me that they love me. I can see the depth of devotion in their eyes; I just can’t quite wrap my head around it. There are people I care deeply for emotionally - possibly bordering on romantically - but never this fiery, all-encompassing, all-consuming passion for one person and one person alone.

I once read about impossible colours: frequencies of light that sit just outside our visual spectrum. Normally, we can’t see them, but with some visual trickery, we can momentarily glitch our brains into processing them. They aren’t the true shades of those colours, though - just our brain desperately trying to make sense of stimuli it can’t understand.

That’s how I feel about the traditional form of romantic love: I can understand it and even get glimpses of it from time to time. But I know what I feel isn’t the true thing, just my heart trying to make sense of stimuli it can’t quite understand.