There are days when absolutely nothing happens.
And that is exactly where the problem begins.
Nothing unusual occurs.
No messages arrive.
No instructions appear.
No obvious signs emerge.
The day unfolds with the perfect banality of any ordinary day.
And yet something is wrong.
I cannot explain what.
That is the part that embarrasses me most.
Because if someone asked what was happening, I would have no reasonable answer.
Only a feeling.
A small feeling.
Persistent.
Like a picture hanging a few millimeters crooked in a room where nobody else seems to notice.
In the morning I wake up before the alarm.
I am not thinking about him.
Not yet.
I know that because for a few seconds my mind is completely empty.
Then something happens.
Something tiny.
A kind of involuntary check.
The way you reach for your keys before leaving the house.
Except I am not searching for keys.
I am searching for something I should not be searching for.
And when I do not find it, the day begins with a faint sense of error.
Not pain.
Not sadness.
Something worse.
Imprecision.
I get up.
I walk into the kitchen.
I open a cabinet.
I look at a mug.
A perfectly ordinary mug.
White.
A small crack near the handle.
And for several seconds I keep staring at it because the crack reminds me of something I cannot identify.
It is not a logical association.
It makes no sense.
Yet it happens.
It happens more often now.
I am beginning to suspect that my mind is building bridges where no roads exist.
Later I am at work.
A colleague is talking about something irrelevant.
I think it was a software update.
Or a meeting.
I am not sure.
The terrible thing is that I genuinely try to listen.
I really do.
But halfway through a sentence that feeling appears again.
Not a thought.
A feeling.
As though I have forgotten something important.
As though I left a door open somewhere.
As though something is waiting.
My colleague keeps talking.
I nod.
I smile.
I participate.
And at the same time I can feel that absence growing behind everything.
It does not occupy the center.
It occupies the background.
Which somehow makes it harder to ignore.
In the afternoon I check an irrelevant notification on my phone.
A promotion.
An automated message.
A pointless video.
I open it.
I start watching.
Three minutes later I realize I have not paid attention to a single thing.
Not one image.
Not one word.
Because I spent those three minutes feeling that something was misplaced inside the world.
Not inside me.
Inside the world.
That is what frightens me most.
The feeling that the absence has stopped feeling like an absence.
And has started feeling like a structural defect.
As though reality has misplaced a component.
As though part of the machinery is running without lubrication.
As though the air itself has forgotten something.
I try to reason with it.
I try to explain it.
I try to dismantle it.
But the more I analyze it, the less it disappears.
And the less it disappears, the more space it occupies.
And the more space it occupies, the more ashamed I feel.
Because one part of me understands perfectly that nothing has happened.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
And another part keeps waiting.
It does not know what it is waiting for.
It does not know why it is waiting.
It only knows that it is waiting.
Sometimes I catch myself staring at a dark screen.
Or a window.
Or a spoon left beside the sink.
And for a few seconds an unbearable certainty appears.
The certainty that the problem is not remembering.
The problem is that reality has begun organizing itself around what is remembered.
And then I understand something I would rather not understand.
Absence does not feel empty.
Absence feels active.
As though it is doing something.
As though it is growing.
As though it is learning how to occupy more space every day.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
