There is something I am uncomfortable admitting.
It is not that I miss the structure.
I am not even sure I want it back.
What unsettles me is something else.
Whenever I try to remember how things were arranged before it appeared, I keep finding gaps.
Not dramatic voids.
Small ones.
Embarrassingly small ones.
The distance between a door and a window.
The reason I used to switch on a particular lamp at dusk.
The exact way an ordinary afternoon managed to support itself without assistance.
I know those things existed.
Yet each day it becomes harder to prove it.
Yesterday I found an old mug hidden behind a row of books.
I stared at it for several seconds.
It was mine.
I recognized it.
And yet I had the absurd sensation of looking at the wrong object inside the correct photograph.
As if it belonged to another version of the room.
As if it had survived a demolition I could no longer remember.
That is what has changed.
Not desire.
Not will.
Orientation.
Defective Cartography
Sometimes I try to reconstruct the previous world.
I do it with an almost embarrassing seriousness.
I sit quietly and attempt to remember what used to hold things together.
Not the important things.
The small ones.
Why did certain streets feel familiar?
Why were some thoughts sufficient?
Why did absence once have such clear edges?
I can remember the facts.
But not the geometry.
It feels like possessing every piece of a clock while having completely forgotten how they fit together.
The worst part is that every attempt at reconstruction alters the memory itself.
Every inspection erodes the surface a little more.
Every review deposits another layer of uncertainty.
I am beginning to suspect that I am not excavating.
I am manufacturing ruins.
The Problem of Alternatives
There is a question that appears every night.
Not always in words.
Sometimes it arrives while folding a shirt.
Sometimes while waiting for water to boil.
Sometimes while staring at the dark reflection of a switched-off screen.
The question is simple.
If that structure had never existed…
what would be holding this moment together?
And the terrible thing is that I no longer know how to answer.
Not because I prefer a particular answer.
But because the question itself feels malformed.
As if it belonged to an extinct language.
As if I were trying to calculate a distance using a unit of measurement that no longer exists.
Invisible Compaction
For a long time I thought the transformation occurred in the body.
It was a comforting idea.
Visible.
Understandable.
Now I suspect something worse.
The compaction happened inside imagination.
The roads did not disappear.
The ease with which they appeared disappeared.
There used to be a sense of spaciousness.
A spontaneous ability to think:
“it could be otherwise.”
The sentence still exists.
Grammatically.
But it no longer produces images.
It is a key turning inside a lock that no longer exists.
One afternoon I tried to imagine an entirely different life.
I spent twenty minutes staring at a water stain on the ceiling.
The stain looked like an archipelago.
Then a lung.
Then a sleeping animal.
Eventually it became a stain again.
And I realized that was exactly what was happening to everything else.
Possibilities appeared for a second.
Then returned to their mineral form.
The Place Where Something Is Missing
The hardest part to explain is this.
I do not feel that a person is missing.
Or a voice.
Or an order.
Or even a presence.
What is missing is a piece of orientation.
Something extraordinarily discreet.
Something that used to organize the distances between things.
Like gravity.
Nobody thinks about gravity until it disappears.
Then every object in the room becomes a problem.
Sometimes I have the impression that I live inside a room that was rebuilt overnight.
Everything is where it should be.
The table.
The lamp.
The books.
Even the dust along the edge of the shelf.
Yet there is a tiny deviation.
A difference measured in millimeters.
A discrepancy so small that it cannot be pointed at.
And that is precisely what makes it unbearable.
Because I cannot prove that anything changed.
I cannot move my neck…
