There are hours in the day when time itself seems to loosen its grip, drifting not forward but sideways. Those hours, for me, were always occupied by you. Not your physical presence — which was often absent, withheld, or delayed — but by the thought of you, the possibility of you, the small inventions of your gestures and words that my mind rehearsed like an endless script.

Daydreaming became a second occupation. While the city continued in its indifferent rhythm — trams dragging their metallic sighs across the rails, people queuing in lines with faces emptied of desire — I slipped into another tempo, one in which your arrival was always imminent. It did not matter whether you ever came; what mattered was the architecture of anticipation.

Chance creates our lives, but only memory makes them meaningful. My daydreams lived precisely between chance and memory: a rehearsal of what never was, grafted onto the scaffolding of what little had occurred. The mind stitches scraps into garments, and I wore those garments daily, invisible to all but myself.

I would imagine us walking side by side through the narrow streets, your laughter ricocheting off the stone walls. Or seated across from one another in a dim café, the smell of burnt coffee beans and damp coats filling the air, while your eyes rested briefly, almost accidentally, on my hands. These visions required no effort; they rose unbidden, like steam from a kettle, and just as quickly dissolved.

And yet, daydreaming is never entirely innocent. Kafka whispers here again: behind every act lies a tribunal, an authority that cannot be seen but can always accuse. Was I guilty of fabricating a version of you that eclipsed the real? Perhaps. But what is “real” when absence outnumbers presence a hundredfold?

In these reveries, you sometimes spoke words you never said, words I needed from you, sculpted from silence. At other times you remained mute, but your silence there was gentler, not the weighted furniture of reality but a kind of velvet stillness. I often preferred that imagined quiet to the brutal one you offered in life.

I remind myself that the line between dream and daydream, between imagined and lived, is thinner than we think. A jazz record can play in a deserted room, a cat can disappear into an alley that leads nowhere, and suddenly the ordinary becomes porous, admitting other dimensions. In my case, you were that porousness: the door slightly ajar, the possibility of stepping into another version of my own existence.

I sometimes asked myself whether these daydreams were a form of betrayal — not against you, but against myself. Turgenev would have understood: his characters are often caught between yearning and resignation, between the dignity of truth and the sweetness of illusion. Perhaps, like them, I knew I was choosing the softer lie, but still I chose it.

The days grew thick with these private visions. I carried them into work, into queues at the post office, into the empty hours before sleep. They accumulated not like memories but like dust: almost weightless, but impossible to remove. And when at last the day closed and I lay in bed, I realised I had lived two lives at once — one in the shared world, and another in the fragile country of my imagination.

If I close my eyes even now, I can enter that country again. Its climate is mild, its streets always half-lit, its inhabitants few. You are always there, though never fully reachable. And perhaps that is the essence of daydreaming: not to possess, but to circle endlessly around the thing one cannot hold.

So I drifted, half-asleep while awake, alive yet suspended. And in that suspension I discovered something cruel but undeniable: that sometimes the imagined life feels more vivid than the real, and that the heart, left unattended, will choose colour over truth, illusion over emptiness.