There are mornings when the air itself conspires toward a fragile optimism. I woke on such a morning, sunlight sliding across the floorboards, and for a moment the weight in my chest seemed lighter, almost absent. Nina Simone’s Feeling Good played in my head — a song too large for my room, yet it filled the corners with its brass and promise.

But joy, I realised, is often a rehearsal rather than a performance. One hums the melody in private, testing whether the notes will hold when exposed to the street outside.

Murakami once wrote of how music can be both shield and weapon, capable of transforming the banal into the uncanny. That morning, the song transformed the act of boiling water into ritual: steam rising like an oracle, announcing not the future but the bare fact of my solitude.

I thought of you, inevitably. Could happiness be authentic if it required the ghost of another to frame it? Was my sense of “feeling good” genuine, or merely a defiance shouted into the cavern of your absence?

Kafka intruded here. He reminds us that even joy may carry its own bureaucracy, silent officials stamping every gesture with suspicion. Was I allowed to be happy without you? Would some unseen clerk file a complaint against my laughter? In that sense, my optimism already contained its trial.

Later, walking through the city, I saw people moving with the weary choreography of routine. Yet the song still echoed, and I caught myself smiling at nothing. Turgenev would have noticed the same: how the smallest flicker of beauty — the tilt of light on a stranger’s hair, the crisp sound of leaves swept by a careless wind — can momentarily dissolve despair. I clung to these details as though they were proof that the world, despite everything, had not entirely abandoned grace.

Still, memory pressed close. Kundera insists that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. My private struggle felt smaller but no less urgent: the attempt to preserve joy against the encroachment of longing. Every time the song repeated in my head, it carried both triumph and irony — triumph because I could still feel it, irony because you were its absent audience.

By evening the optimism had thinned. Yet even its residue mattered. For a few hours, I had tasted the possibility of another life — one not structured around absence, but around a quiet resilience.

And perhaps that is what “feeling good” really means: not an absolute state, but a temporary reprieve, a reprieve that recognises its own fragility. Like sunlight across the floorboards: already fading, but no less real for that.

It astonishes me still, how love can occupy a room so completely and then, without ceremony, leave it hollow. The air itself changes; once it carried sparks, now it resists the simplest flame.

There was a time when speaking with you felt like placing my hand against a warm pane of glass. Even through the barrier, heat passed. We made plans, unanchored but luminous, and the future seemed pliable, like clay waiting for our fingerprints. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, that warmth cooled. Conversations grew shorter, diluted, as though our words had been stirred into too much water.

I thought of James Taylor then, of Fire and Rain, that lament for what arrives and vanishes, for what we wish to hold but cannot. Fire: the brilliance of our first laughter in the car park, songs tossed back and forth like gifts. Rain: the gradual erosion, the quiet flooding of silence, the messages unanswered, the endless waiting beneath indifferent skies.

Some evenings I would scroll back through our exchanges, as though evidence might restore presence. But the words felt strangely displaced, like letters found in an attic long after their sender has died. Memory reshapes itself; it polishes what should stay rough, and in doing so creates a fiction more fragile than truth.

I asked myself — perhaps too often — whether the decline was my fault. Did I lean too much? Did I offer too little? Kafka whispers here: in his world, guilt is certain even without a crime. I felt condemned by some unspoken law, a regulation I could never locate in writing.

One night, while listening to the rain hammer against my window, I imagined you standing outside, soaked, unable to find the door. It was not a dream, nor entirely fantasy; it was the kind of vision that slips in when solitude becomes too sharp. I almost opened the door. But of course, you were not there. The street was empty except for water carving small rivers along the curb.

And yet, the memory of fire would not extinguish itself. It flared up at odd moments: a phrase of a song on the radio, a colour on the street that recalled your jacket, the faint smell of grapes in a supermarket aisle. The past intruded without permission, leaving behind its embers.

Kundera reminds us that love is bound not only to presence but to its recollection. What survives is not the reality, but the echo — and echoes, though faint, can linger far longer than the voice that made them.

So here I remain, between fire and rain. Fire that promised permanence, rain that dissolved it. Neither wholly gone, neither wholly present. Only the stubborn ache of something that once burned brightly and now falls steadily, drop by drop, refusing to end.

There is a kind of pain that feels almost ceremonial — a sorrow so precisely tailored it seems designed for you alone. The French gave it a name: la douleur exquise. I never needed the language to know the sensation, though the borrowed phrase lent it a shape, a border, a faint perfume of elegance.

To love without return is not merely to hunger; it is to prepare a banquet no one attends, to light candles whose smoke curls into an empty chair. I told myself that what I felt for you was not love but its cousin, something lighter, something survivable. Yet in the silence after your departures, the cousin grew indistinguishable from the original.

You must understand: this exquisite pain was not violent. It had the slow rhythm of a dripping tap, the monotony of trains delayed without explanation. Days built themselves around the small punctuations of your messages, or their absence. When you appeared, my world unfolded like paper lanterns; when you disappeared, everything folded back, leaving sharp creases I could not smooth out.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake and feel as though you had been sitting at the edge of the bed, watching. There was no movement, no sound, only the faint indentation of your absence on the mattress. Such moments were not dreams, exactly, nor waking; they belonged to that narrow corridor where reality admits visitors it later denies.

Kafka might have called it a trial without accusation: I was both plaintiff and defendant, waiting for a judge who never entered the room. And yet the trial continued, day after day, in the unspoken negotiations of my own thoughts. Was it love? Was it projection? Was I guilty of inventing you beyond recognition?

I remember standing once at a tram stop, rain trembling in the yellow light, and feeling that the city itself knew. Not of you, specifically, but of the human tendency to love where love cannot survive. The pavements, the gutters, the tired faces of strangers — all of it seemed to murmur that this was nothing new, only my turn in the old cycle of exquisite pain.

Kundera insists that memory is not the opposite of forgetting but a form of it. I think I began to understand him then. For I remembered you not as you were, but as I rearranged you: softer here, more attentive there, a figure edited until he resembled the man I wished to have known. The true you slipped further away with every recollection.

And yet, if offered the choice, would I have surrendered that pain? I doubt it. There was a peculiar dignity in carrying it, as though to admit my desire without return was to step into a lineage of countless others who had done the same. A silent brotherhood, a secret society of the refused.

Sometimes, walking through the city at dusk, I imagined I could see its other members: a woman waiting too long at a café table, a man buying flowers he would later throw away. We did not speak to each other, of course. We only recognised the signs, and in that recognition there was a brief easing of the burden.

The exquisite pain, then, was both cage and key: it confined me to the narrow space of my longing, but it also gave me something unambiguously my own. In a life often dictated by others’ demands, here at least was a sovereignty of feeling.

And still, at the core of it, there remained a question without answer: did I love you, or the wound you left?

… No amount of sleep, no amount of wine. Nothing else will do, I have got to have you

There were mornings when the world seemed to start in your absence. Not simply without you, but actively shaped by the hollow where you ought to have been. On such days, I would make coffee — bitter, as though brewed directly from the residue of old conversations — and drink it slowly, trying to imagine the taste of your company.

But the coffee never lasted long enough to fill the gap. Its steam rose like a signal into an indifferent sky, dissolving before it could be read. Sometimes I would pour a second cup just to watch the steam again, as if repetition might create permanence. Yet permanence is the one ingredient coffee refuses to hold.

I began to suspect that my longing for you had less to do with you as a person and more with the strange scaffolding we had built together — the framework of small rituals, songs exchanged, half-played chess games, and the unspoken agreements that grew in the dark like mushrooms. Remove one beam from such a structure and it trembles; remove another, and it still stands, but in a different geometry, unrecognisable and slightly absurd.

It was in those days that crying returned to me as a habit. Not the sudden violence of grief, but a steady, disciplined exercise — the sort of crying that arrives in a chair by the window and stays for an afternoon, leafing through its own catalogue of reasons. I would let it speak, sometimes. Other times I drowned it in noise, though the noise was often your absence echoing back at me.

In Kafka’s stories, characters are often trapped in systems that make no sense, and I found myself wondering if you were my private bureaucracy — a labyrinth of rules never written, yet always enforced. There was no application form for closeness, no formal rejection letter, just the slow return of unanswered messages, the invisible stamp of “not urgent” pressed into my days. And yet I queued every morning as though my turn might finally come.

I kept thinking: perhaps if I brew the coffee at just the right temperature, or cry at the correct volume, the balance will tilt. You will appear, not as a ghost in the phone, but in the doorway, bringing with you the weather of your voice, the careless gravity of your hands. But no. The doorway remained a doorway.

Kundera once wrote that we live everything as it comes, without rehearsal, and that gives it both weight and lightness. In the space between us, weight and lightness took turns confusing me. There were days when the smallest memory — your laugh tilting sideways into surprise — weighed down the air, and days when entire weeks floated by, detached from anything resembling consequence.

At night, my dreams grew crowded with places we had never been. Cafés with endless counters, each cup waiting for a mouth that never arrived. Railway stations where the announcement boards flickered your name but never assigned a platform. In those moments, I knew the dreams were trying to tell me something — not about you, but about myself. That I was living inside a suspended departure.

And so, I carried on: no amount of coffee to keep me awake to your absence, no amount of crying to wash it out. Between the two, I began to notice a strange stillness taking root. Perhaps this is what comes after the bureaucracy of the heart has processed your file and placed it in the cabinet marked “unresolved, but no longer urgent”.

One afternoon, I looked out of the window and saw the street shining from a sudden rain. The air smelt faintly metallic, like coins in a warm hand. For a moment, I thought of stepping outside, walking without aim until I reached the edge of something — a park, a bridge, a version of myself less entangled. But I stayed inside, watching the steam from my cup curl upward into nothing, and wondered if perhaps the nothing was the truest thing we had left.

It began in the faint blue light of a computer screen, where your voice always arrived a fraction too late, as though it had been forced to pass through some narrow bureaucratic corridor before reaching me. I sometimes imagined that corridor lined with half-open doors, each revealing fragments of other people’s conversations, faint and incomprehensible, like echoes from lives I was not meant to know.

We did not see each other in the flesh much then; our shared physical spaces had been abandoned to dust and casual strangers. Yet in that absence, we began to speak more. Absence, I have since realised, is sometimes the more efficient courier of intimacy.

I grew to know the topography of your silences — the hollows that deepened when you withdrew, the ridges that formed when you returned. On certain days you vanished entirely into your own coat, grey and impenetrable. On others you unfolded, unexpectedly, like a city map, tracing for me streets and corners I had never walked but felt I already understood. It was then I began sending you songs — little parcels of sound, carefully wrapped, as though by listening you might step, even briefly, into the rooms of my life.

One song was always first in the queue: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. I told myself it was a joke, a bit of cheerful bravado. Yet in truth it was a fragile talisman. I needed its refrain to persuade myself that the obstacles between us — the schedules, the geography, the slow erosion of shared time — could be outpaced by will alone. But the mountains the song spoke of were not geological; they were internal. And such peaks, I would later learn, appear only when you try to cross them.

When your name flashed on my phone, my body reacted with the absurd precision of a laboratory animal trained to a bell. A colony of invisible insects seemed to stir inside me, restless and bright. I reorganised my days around the possibility of those vibrations, until I noticed that music — the music that had once accompanied everything — had begun to fall away. The metronome you unknowingly carried with you was gone whenever you were gone.

The last time we met was without ceremony. We drove my red car aimlessly, singing half-remembered lyrics, sipping grape juice from a thin plastic cup that left an aftertaste of supermarket aisles. You teased me about it; I defended the choice as ecologically sound, still in that phase of life when correctness seemed a form of righteousness. Later, parked in the supermarket lot, we lingered as though the place were a public square, an agreed site for honest talk. I remember thinking, foolishly but sincerely, that we could live in that moment forever, like insects preserved in amber.

I sang you a Spanish song. You laughed, not at me but at the surprise of it, as if a locked drawer had slid open in my throat. The night outside was unremarkable, a dark sheet draped over the city, yet it seemed to hum faintly, as though aware of its own transience.

In the weeks that followed, questions arrived like damp seeping through a wall. Did you like me, or the idea of me? Did you love my actual self, or only the sketch — the book-reading, trivia-spouting, ankle-boot-wearing woman who made quips with the precision of someone who had rehearsed? The distinction mattered more than I wanted to admit.

Even in chess I held myself back, moving deliberately towards defeat. I feared that to win might puncture something delicate in you, something you would not name but would never forgive me for disturbing. This performance of ignorance had been my armour for years; I no longer knew where the pretence ended and I began.

Then there was the day you did not come. I waited beneath a lemon-scented tree, watching ants carry burdens twice their size, until the daylight turned indifferent. Later you wrote: “I slept all afternoon.” A sentence so short it might have been issued by a civil servant. I shrank, as one does when discovering the world can continue without you and not even flinch.

The silences grew heavier. I moved them from room to room in my head like cumbersome furniture, but they always returned to the centre, unignorable. I sent you a book and a memory card, a quiet offering — some attempt to protect your things with something of mine. Whether you read it or not I never knew, and that unknowing became another piece of furniture.

Now, looking back, I think of us as a harbour where ships left before dawn. Those who arrived found only salt in the air, the vessels long gone.

The mountain from the song was never really there. It was a match in the pocket, struck briefly to light a path we never walked. We spent most of our time on separate continents, yet the true distance between us was measured in inches — between my hand and yours on the gearstick, between my voice and your ear in that fraction of a second where yes might still have been possible.

I loved you with the optimism of someone who believes that playlists and car parks at midnight can anchor a future. But some futures never anchor; they dock briefly, unload an indistinct rumour, and leave without giving a destination.

If I am honest, you may have loved the label on the box more than what it contained. And I may have loved you because you stood, unknowingly, between me and the version of myself that could stop pretending.

The last time I recall seeing you clearly, you were smiling at how I matched my car — as though identity could be measured in shades of red. I still keep the taste of plastic grape juice, the small absurdity of its persistence.

Why write this now? Perhaps because I remember that night in the empty car park, two cars identical: in one, we laugh; in the other, we sit silent. Both truths exist, layered over each other. Shift them even slightly, and the outlines blur.

The mountain, if it ever was one, has dissolved. All that remains is the valley, patient, holding the echo of a song about obstacles that were, in the end, only ourselves. And I have learnt — without quite meaning to — that some stories end not with conclusions, but with a quiet folding away, as if placed in a drawer whose key has long been misplaced.