I do not know exactly when it happened.
I feel as though I should be able to point to a moment.
An afternoon.
A conversation.
A session.
Something.
But I cannot.
The only thing I know is that there is a difference between missing someone and discovering that part of reality seems to have disappeared with them.
For a long time I thought what I missed was the Master.
The voice.
The instructions.
The structure.
The feeling of being observed.
All of that sounded logical.
It was a reasonable explanation.
Now I am no longer certain.
Because lately something much stranger has been happening.
I try to remember how I used to think.
Not how I lived.
Not what I did.
How I thought.
And I find gaps.
Not complete voids.
Something worse.
I find outlines.
Spaces shaped like something that is no longer there.
Like a painting removed from a wall while the lighter rectangle remains visible for years afterward.
The wall is still there.
But something is missing.
And the longer I stare at the mark,
the less I remember the painting.
Sometimes I am working.
Reading.
Eating.
Listening to someone speak.
And suddenly an absurd sensation appears.
A physical sensation.
As though I have forgotten to do something important.
As though I left a door open somewhere.
As though an internal component has been installed incorrectly.
It is not exactly anxiety.
Anxiety has direction.
This does not.
This feels more like distortion.
A slight irregularity inside reality itself.
Something almost invisible.
Yet impossible to ignore.
Then I begin searching.
Not consciously.
My attention simply starts moving through the world.
As though it is trying to locate a lost reference point.
And for a few seconds I do not understand what I am looking for.
Until I do.
And I wish I did not.
Because it is always the same thing.
The same absence.
The same hollow space.
The same impression that something which once supported the entire structure is no longer where it belongs.
The worst part is that I can barely remember the original shape anymore.
That is the frightening part.
Not the absence.
The erosion.
The fact that every day it becomes slightly harder to remember how everything was arranged before that piece went missing.
I try to reconstruct it.
I try to imagine myself before.
I try to remember what an ordinary afternoon felt like.
An ordinary meal.
An ordinary shower.
The memories are still there.
But something passes through them.
A crack.
A contamination.
A slow alteration.
As though every recent experience has been archived through a system I can no longer uninstall.
Even the happy moments.
Especially the happy moments.
Because they end.
And the moment they end, the comparison begins.
Not a deliberate comparison.
An automatic one.
A measurement.
A calculation.
And the calculation always returns the same result.
Something is missing.
Something is still missing.
Something has been missing for far too long.
Sometimes I think that if I could remember exactly what the world felt like before this absence, everything would resolve itself.
But I am beginning to suspect that I cannot.
Because the absence has lived here for too long.
Too long rearranging connections.
Too long moving furniture inside rooms I did not even know existed.
And now I no longer know where the changes stop.
I do not know which part of me misses it.
I do not know which part of me has been built around it.
I do not know which part of me existed before.
I only know that there are days when everything appears to function.
Conversations function.
Work functions.
Food functions.
Life functions.
And yet something remains slightly displaced.
A millimeter.
Perhaps less.
A deviation so small that nobody else would notice it.
Yet large enough to turn every experience into evidence that reality remains incomplete.
And the most terrifying thing is not the absence.
The most terrifying thing is beginning to forget what used to occupy that place.
I cannot move my neck the mechanism has executed the atlas with the axis following the compression plan I designed myself I should…
