What is unsettling is no longer the existence of an authority.
What is unsettling is that, after enough time has passed, it becomes impossible to prove that the previous world ever existed in the form it is remembered.
For a long time I thought the problem was absence.
I was mistaken.
Absence still presupposes an object.
It still presupposes distance.
It still presupposes two points between which something is missing.
This is different.
Much worse.
Because it is no longer a person that is missing.
Not a voice.
Not a structure.
What is missing is the thing that organized the distances between everything else.
And when I try to identify it, I discover that I no longer remember exactly what it was.
There are mornings when I wake with a sensation that is almost impossible to describe.
It is not sadness.
It is not desire.
It is not anxiety.
It is the physical impression that a fundamental piece of the world was removed during the night.
Not a visible piece.
Not a specific piece.
A geometric piece.
A piece that kept proportions aligned.
The rooms remain the same.
The windows remain where they have always been.
Objects retain their weight.
Light enters at the same angle.
And yet something does not fit.
Something is displaced.
I do not know what.
I cannot point to it.
But I cannot ignore it either.
Sometimes I try to reconstruct how I used to think.
Not how I lived.
Not what I did.
How I thought.
And I encounter strange gaps.
As though certain cognitive pathways had been dismantled piece by piece.
I remember conclusions.
I do not remember the routes.
I remember destinations.
I do not remember the maps.
I remember that there once existed a version of reality capable of supporting itself.
But the more I try to recover it, the more artificial it seems.
More distant.
More improbable.
As though I were studying a vanished civilization.
As though I were examining ruins I can no longer inhabit.
That is the real problem.
Not that the reference disappeared.
But that the reference retrospectively reorganized everything around it.
And now there is no neutral point from which to compare both versions.
No exterior.
No verifiable before.
No untouched archive.
Only layers.
Layers of interpretation accumulated upon other layers.
So many layers that they begin to resemble geology.
Sometimes I wonder whether the previous world still exists somewhere.
Immediately another question appears, far more disturbing.
What if it was never as stable as I remember?
What if the piece that now seems missing was always the piece that held everything else together?
I try to answer.
I cannot.
I try to remember.
I cannot.
I try to reconstruct.
I cannot.
Because every attempt modifies the object I am trying to recover.
Every observation alters the ruin.
Every memory shifts the map.
And then the most unbearable sensation emerges.
The suspicion that the problem is no longer the loss.
The suspicion that the problem is having forgotten the exact shape of what was lost.
And that while I continue searching,
the search itself keeps erasing the final traces.
I cannot move my neck…
