My neighbor

Today I had a short email conversation with a guy I've lived in the same apartment complex with for 10 months. He's a cool guy, and I've always kind of wished I was friends with him, but whenever I talk to him we always end up having the weirdest conversations. Most recently, it was the relations of mushrooms and pole vaulting to death. Yeah. Anyway, he was feeling kind of tired of life, and I sent some random message about taking a brief life vacation, but made it just dorky enough to not be serious. I can never be serious with this guy because I don't know him. And then I felt bad about how useless and pointless my message was, and I really wanted to send him another message just to be like, you know what, that's not what I meant. What I wanted to say is I'm sorry, I know life's rough. I'm here for you if you need anything, I hope you make it through soon. But I couldn't send that second message for the same reason I didn't just say that in the first: I don't know him well enough, and I'm afraid he'd think I'm weird. Isn't it strange how our fears keep us from doing what we really want to, but then those fears sort of end up coming true anyway because we don't do what we want to. Why is it so hard to say you care about someone you're not close to, and why don't we believe the people who say it to us?Are we really so skeptical about love that we think it can only be felt for those we know most intimately?