The people you know best are the ones you see least clearly.

Not because they’ve changed beyond recognition. Because checking stopped feeling necessary. There’s a working sketch of them, finalized at some point you can’t quite identify, and you’ve been consulting it instead of them ever since. When they say something that fits the sketch, you hear it. When they say something that doesn’t, you hear it as a mood.

This is what knowing someone usually means. Not ongoing perception. A file, occasionally updated.

The strange part is how much it feels like care. The confidence, the shorthand, the sense that no introduction is needed. All of it indistinguishable, from the inside, from actually paying attention.