He was born without the soft pulse that stirs most hearts. Where others cried, he only watched. Where joy would bloom in a child, he felt nothing — not sadness, not warmth, only awareness. Doctors called it a neurological anomaly, a rare quiet in the brain where emotions are meant to speak.
As he grew, he learned to mimic what he could not feel. He smiled because others smiled. He said "I'm sorry" because that was what the moment demanded. Yet behind the gestures, there was only a hollow understanding — like reading a book about rain but never once feeling it fall.
He wasn't cruel. He simply lacked the map that led others through love, grief, and fear. Life to him was logical, mechanical — every relationship a study, every tear an equation. And though people called him emotionless, he often wondered what it must be like to truly feel — to be wounded by kindness, or lifted by affection.
Because even without emotion, he knew one truth: emptiness can ache, too.