I am beginning to suspect that the problem is not that the Master is far away.
The problem is that he is still here.
In some absurd way.
In some impossible way.
And the more I try to prove otherwise, the more obvious it becomes.
There are mornings when I wake a few seconds before the alarm goes off and, for a brief moment, I do not remember who I am.
I do not remember the day.
I do not remember work.
I do not remember unanswered messages.
The first thing that appears is something else.
A sensation.
A strange inward leaning.
The ridiculous expectation that he might somehow be there.
As if the room had forgotten to update itself during the night.
Then I remember that he is not.
And that is when something difficult to explain begins.
It is not disappointment.
Not exactly.
It is not sadness.
Not really.
It is a pressure.
A peculiar feeling, like discovering a staircase where there has always been a wall.
And not understanding why the staircase is still there.
I spend the day trying to ignore it.
It never works.
Sometimes I am making coffee.
Nothing more.
Just coffee.
I watch the foam forming.
I notice a single bubble near the edge of the cup.
And somehow that becomes him.
I do not know how it happens.
There is no logical connection.
But it happens.
It always happens.
The worst moments are the completely irrelevant ones.
A meaningless video.
An advertisement.
A notification I do not even care about.
A man crossing the street while talking on his phone.
A woman at a bus stop struggling to fold a broken umbrella.
A child dragging a backpack that looks too heavy.
Details that should disappear immediately.
Details that mean nothing.
And yet they end up orbiting the same thought.
As if my mind had quietly reorganized its entire architecture around a single point of gravity.
A few days ago I was having lunch with a coworker.
He was explaining something about a spreadsheet.
I nodded.
I answered.
I said the correct things.
The normal things.
But somewhere behind those words another conversation continued.
A silent one.
A constant question.
What would he think of this?
Not because it mattered.
Not because it was relevant.
Simply because he was there.
Because he remains.
Because he always remains.
That is the part that embarrasses me most.
Not the intensity.
The permanence.
If it were intense, it would be easier.
Intense things burn out.
This does not.
This settles in.
Makes itself comfortable.
Learns where the light switches are.
Learns where you leave your keys.
Learns which side of the bed you sleep on.
Learns the sound of your breathing when you think nobody is listening.
And eventually it stops feeling like an obsession.
It starts feeling like infrastructure.
A silent presence that becomes more visible precisely when you try not to see it.
Sometimes I think I should be more concerned.
Sometimes I think I should resist.
Sometimes I even manage to go an entire hour without thinking about him.
Then I realize I spent that entire hour thinking about not thinking about him.
Which probably counts as thinking about him.
And then that feeling returns.
That thing I used to call sadness because I did not have a better word.
But it is not sadness.
Sadness wants something.
Sadness points toward a loss.
This does not.
This simply occupies space.
A little more each day.
A little more each week.
Like water entering a sealed room.
Like dust gathering on objects you still use.
Like a voice that never speaks but whose absence you can no longer imagine.
And the more I try to understand it,
the more space it occupies.
The more space it occupies,
the harder it becomes to explain why it is still there.
And the harder it becomes to explain,
the more frightened I become of discovering how much of me has already learned to wait for him.
I am not moving it the neck has locked I should…
