Living inside this laboratory under the rigor of the system has taught me something I do not know how to explain without feeling ashamed.
Absence does not feel like emptiness.
It feels like a removed component.
As if someone opened my body while I slept and extracted a small, perfectly fitted piece, a piece whose existence I never noticed because it had always been there.
And now it is gone.
That is the unbearable part.
Not the pain.
Not the waiting.
Not the distance.
The exact shape of what is missing.
I can be working.
I can be talking.
I can be laughing.
I can be explaining something completely ordinary to a completely ordinary person.
And beneath all of it the sensation remains.
The sensation of a cavity.
A geometric absence.
Something that should be carrying the weight of the hours and no longer does.
Sometimes I try to remember what life felt like before.
I find nothing.
Because the problem is not that I remember too much.
The problem is that I can no longer remember the structure I used to exist inside when that piece was still in place.
Everything continues functioning.
That is the strange part.
I still walk.
I still eat.
I still answer messages.
I still complete tasks.
But the functioning has become mechanical.
Like a city after an evacuation.
The lights still turn on.
The elevators still move.
The traffic signals still change.
But nobody knows exactly for whom.
There are worse moments.
Small moments.
Ridiculous moments.
A glass in the kitchen.
An irrelevant notification.
A song.
And then it appears.
Not a thought.
Not an image.
Something more physical.
More intimate.
The perception that the world has been assembled incorrectly.
As if a component of the mechanism had been removed and nobody else seems to notice.
I look at other people.
They talk.
They eat.
They make plans.
And I wonder whether they feel this too.
The constant suspicion that something fundamental has disappeared.
The sensation that reality remains standing only out of habit.
That everything continues because the collapse has not yet arrived.
Sometimes I think I am exaggerating.
Then I try to ignore it.
I try to stay busy.
I try to distract myself.
I try to fill the hours.
And for a few minutes it seems to work.
Then it returns.
It always returns.
Not as an emotion.
As a correction.
Like an invisible hand returning to point toward the exact place where the missing piece should be.
Here.
Here.
Here.
And suddenly I feel it again.
The cavity.
The absence.
The hollow perfectly shaped around something that is no longer there.
The worst part is that I am beginning to forget the shape of what is missing.
Only the hollow remains.
Only the architecture of absence remains.
Only the physical evidence that something supported my world for far too long.
And now it is gone.
And nobody seems to see it.
And nobody seems to hear it.
And nobody seems to understand why some nights I remain motionless staring at a wall for forty minutes.
Because I am not looking at the wall.
I am trying to hear the sound a structure makes when an essential piece is missing and it still has not decided whether to collapse.
The contract fuses with the vertebra the flow of will seals into the mineralized pact I cannot move my fingers the mechanism has welded the atlas with the axis strictly following the immobility clause I should…
