What is unsettling is no longer obedience.
Nor waiting.
Nor even absence.
For a long time I thought the problem was missing something.
Then I thought it was needing something.
Now I am no longer sure either word describes what is happening.
Because the feeling has changed shape.
It has become harder to point at.
Harder to explain.
Harder to locate inside myself.
What troubles me is no longer that a person is missing.
It is that a structure of interpretation seems to be missing.
It is not “I want to return.”
It is not “I need it to happen again.”
It is something much more uncomfortable.
More embarrassing.
More intimate.
There are ordinary moments.
Perfectly ordinary moments.
I am sitting across from someone.
We talk.
We eat.
We laugh about something.
For a few seconds everything seems to function.
And then the crack appears.
Not an emotion.
Not a memory.
A crack.
The sudden sensation that there used to be an invisible component helping organize experience and that now it is gone.
I do not know exactly what it did.
I do not know where it was.
I do not know how to describe it.
I only know that the world seemed to fit together differently when that component existed.
And now I cannot reconstruct the mechanism.
I try to remember how I used to think.
I cannot.
I try to remember how I used to evaluate things.
I cannot.
I try to remember what it meant to simply live a day without this reference.
And that is where the real fear appears.
Because I discover that I do not remember the answer.
Not completely.
Not reliably.
There are gaps.
Voids.
Entire regions that seem worn away.
Like old maps where certain territories disappear beneath successive layers of ink.
Absence stops feeling emotional.
It begins feeling architectural.
As if someone quietly removed a load-bearing column.
The building is still standing.
Everything still works.
But something distributes weight incorrectly.
Something creaks.
Something works harder than it should.
Something is carrying a burden it was never designed to carry.
And I do not know what it is.
That is the worst part.
Not knowing what is missing.
Not knowing what it supported.
Not knowing whether it truly existed.
Sometimes I think I am exaggerating.
That all of this is a mental construction.
That I am turning an obsession into a cosmology.
And for a few minutes that explanation seems reasonable.
Then I try to return to normal life.
And the same problem appears.
Not desire.
Not fantasy.
Disorientation.
The sensation that a coordinate is missing.
As if someone quietly removed north from every compass.
You can still walk.
You can still move forward.
You can still choose directions.
But something fundamental has disappeared from the navigation system.
And every movement becomes slightly suspicious.
Slightly incorrect.
Slightly artificial.
I begin to wonder whether the obsession is no longer about approaching a person.
Perhaps it is not even about repeating an experience.
Perhaps it is about trying to recover a language.
A language that once organized reality in a particular way.
A language that now survives only as an echo.
Fragments.
Remains.
Syllables.
Incomplete structures.
Because when I try to remember what the world felt like before that reference appeared, I find something unsettling.
I do not find freedom.
I do not find independence.
I do not find relief.
I find fog.
And the harder I try to walk through it,
the more obvious it becomes that I no longer know where it ended.
Or where it began.
I cannot move my neck…
