What should I feel?

I have always felt like the outsider, looking in, watching the world and everything in it slowly die. I have never felt connected to anything or anyone.
I only see sadness and death. Even in the face of a laughing child, all I see is how temporary, how fleeting existence is, how small we are and how nothing matters at all.
I only see how that child will grow up, lose its ethereal innocence to adolescent corruption, become an adult working 40 hours a week in a dead end job, so mundane and without happiness, and finally grow elderly to die alone and helpless in a world blanketed with gray to be forgotten in another graveyard, surrounded by hundreds of others whose faces are forgotten by all but the tombstones.
I look too long and too deeply at things, I think.
Sometimes I wonder if I know what happiness truly feels like. Sometimes I wonder if I am completely normal and in actuality, everyone feels the same as me and I am no more special or unique than they.
Sometimes I wonder if I try to appear different in hopes that people will notice me, so that I won’t be alone. Like now.
But I am not alone.
I have you.

Or do I? The way you talk about me, the way you interact with me and touch me…you really love me. Deeply.
When you talk about feelings you get when I smile, about how it melts all of your worries away and fills you with warmth, I can’t help but feel a longing sadness.
You love me, you do. But I feel nothing, just as I always have. I feel no warmth in your smile. Why are we together, then? Because I was so young and foolish and mistook excitement at something new – you’re my first, of course – for something more.
And now, I can’t bear to tell you these things for what it will do to you.
You are a sensitive soul, and no offense, but emotionally you’re rather clingy. Not a bad thing, I am too.
But that means that without me, and you’ve told me this yourself…without me you’d spiral into depression and find no reason to live.
I can’t bear the thought of that. You don’t deserve it.

I do think I care for you, though sometimes I feel I don’t care for anything in this world at all. I feel not of this world and of its people.
You are such a wonderful young man, and a beautiful person. But I wonder if you were meant for someone else, someone who can sincerely return your feelings. I am unsure if I am capable of that.
I really do cherish your company, for though I have never felt connected with anyone, I do with you. I have never felt closer to anyone, I feel like you are my other half, ignoring clichés.
It is like we are two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that happen to fit perfectly together, you are for me and I you.
You are my everything, my world, and I do feel stirrings of deep affection and fondness for you.
When we embrace, I cannot help but feel the safest I have ever felt, a comfort I have never known.
Given time, will these develop into what you describe? You are a year older than me, after all.
If so, how long would it take? Another year or so? Two? Never?
Can we stop and wait for something that may never come?
Perhaps I do feel what you feel, everyone feels things differently.
But is this love? How can I know if I’ve never felt it before?
If it were love, I wouldn’t have to ask these things. Which brings up all those thoughts in the first place.
I realize that still, I am so young. I am little more than a child at 16.
But I am not foolish, and far from unintelligent.
Or do I just think so, like every other girl my age?
Am I, like every other girl, giving too deep an importance and dramatic exaggeration to this?
Does anything even matter?
I also realize high school relationships hardly count as such, they are nothing more than silly little games.
Yet I honestly feel I have something special with you. Can we be something different, something more?
If I am proven to be wrong, so be it. We will both be devastated, certainly, but in time we will grow from it.
Everyone does.

I wish to God that I could be the one who loves you, the one who returns all of those feelings.
But I have to stop lying to myself, and more importantly you.
As hard as it is for me to say…I simply cannot force what isn’t there.

Come what may.