Rose AlMuhessenJust now--
In the beginning, love appears to be a primitive attempt to defeat loneliness.
As though humanity, from the moment it became conscious, has done nothing except search for another person capable of softening the terror of existing alone within this cold universe. We do not love because the world is beautiful; we love because the world becomes unbearable when endured in solitude. That is why “two” has always seemed like a sacred number—not because it is complete, but because it is the least painful form of loneliness.
You and I… an even number.
A simple equation that suggests balance, as if two souls could divide the burden of existence equally. Yet the problem is that human relationships rarely collapse because of hatred. More often, they are destroyed by something darker and more complex: that symbolic creature we call “the devil.”
And the devil here is not merely the religious figure, but everything that slips between two souls and transforms intimacy into estrangement: doubt, fear, selfishness, excessive awareness, the desire for control, or even a deep exhaustion with life itself.
When the devil enters between two people, they do not become three.
That is the illusion most people fail to understand.
The devil does not add a new presence; he steals the distance necessary for love to breathe. He ceases to be a “third” and instead becomes an invisible wall, a cold emptiness standing between two people who once believed they could survive together.
In truth, relationships do not die suddenly; they decay slowly, the way iron corrodes from within without making a sound. It begins with a small silence, a tired glance, an unspoken sentence, a postponed apology, a disappointment unable to find the proper language to describe itself. Then one day, both people realize they are still sitting in the same place, yet each has become trapped within a separate psychological continent.
And here the existential tragedy reveals itself in its cruelest form:
to be physically close to someone while an abyss stretches endlessly between you.
The real devil is not a creature with horns and flames, but that merciless consciousness which prevents one human being from ever fully merging with another. We are condemned to remain prisoners of ourselves, no matter how deeply we love. We may touch the other, kiss them, sleep beside them, yet we can never completely enter their consciousness. There is always a locked door deep within every human being—a door for which no one possesses the key, not even those who love us most.
That is why relationships sometimes become nothing more than prolonged negotiations against loneliness rather than victories over it.
Each person attempts to use the other as a temporary anesthetic against their inner emptiness, yet the void never disappears; it merely changes shape. And when love grows too exhausted to continue playing the role of a cure, the devil emerges in the form of a postponed truth:
that two people do not always become a “we”; sometimes they become merely two lonelinesses standing side by side.
Perhaps this is why separation feels less terrifying than remaining inside a relationship that has died spiritually.
For the cruelest form of loneliness is not to be alone in reality, but to feel alone beside someone who was once your psychological homeland.
You and I are an even number…
but the devil does not need to become our third.
It is enough for him to stand between us, turning love into distance, words into small corpses, and hearts into locked rooms—each hearing the echo of the other without ever truly reaching it.
By ✍🏻 Rose AlMuhessen
