She walks alone down the airport corridor, her young children clinging to her hands as if they were anchors against the vastness of the unknown. The country she had left behind was composed of strange words piled in the air like transparent glass blocks: visible, but intangible. Every conversation required effort; every sentence was an unstable bridge over an invisible river. She learned to smile at that river, but smiling does not equate to crossing, as crossing requires confidence she never had.

Now she is returning. Every syllable she utters in the language of her childhood sounds like ancient music: familiar, soft and unsurprising. Even the sounds of the wind, the noise of cars and the clinking of glass on the street seem to adjust to the rhythm of her breathing. She realises that some of her anxiety was not fear of the future, but exhaustion from constantly existing in translations, trying to transform every feeling and gesture into something that could be understood by eyes and ears that did not belong to her.

Now she watches her children running across the square, their steps small and erratic, yet full of purpose. One of them stumbles, gets up, and continues laughing. The scene is simple, yet it conceals a miracle: nothing needs to be translated or explained. They live in the moment, with no memories of lost languages and no desire for control. As she watches them, she realises that her breathing, which was previously tense, is slowing down almost imperceptibly. It is as if her body remembers something her mind had forgotten: existence does not require planning or translation.

She thinks about the weight of the years and the effort it took to control everything: to measure every step, decision and emotion. She remembers the mornings when she would get up before sunrise to prepare coffee, clothes and words, as if she could organise the world before it broke. Now, she realises that the world cannot be organised and that the illusion of control is the greatest prison. Paradoxically, accepting that nothing can be controlled is the first step to freedom.

The sky opens up to reveal colours she doesn’t remember, and for a moment, the world seems unstable, almost liquid. A cat crosses the street with deliberate steps, as if it knows the secret order of things. She wonders if cats know something that humans have forgotten: that life does not require understanding, only presence. The surrealism of the moment — the wind dancing on the roof and the leaves spinning in impossible spirals — makes sense. Not logical sense, but an inner sense — the kind that can only be perceived when the mind stops resisting time and space.

She thinks about impermanence: her children’s childhood, life in a foreign country and the love that fell apart without explanation. Everything moves, everything changes and everything disappears. And yet, she feels that every loss, every absence and every moment of anxiety has contributed to making her the woman she is today: returning and breathing without needing to translate anything in order to exist.

There are moments when she feels her memory’s presence as a tangible, almost solid object. A cup of tea spilled years ago; a missed gesture of affection; a night spent crying alone. These fragments float in her field of vision like objects suspended in water and she observes them without touching them. Acceptance does not require the destruction of the past, only silent recognition: everything that has passed has formed the invisible contours of who she is now.

As she walks through the streets of her hometown, she realises that every corner holds echoes of her childhood. However, these echoes do not imprison her. They are clues to help her navigate the present. The voices around her seem to speak to her differently; each word carries with it the reassurance of being understood immediately. Communication becomes almost magical, and she realises that the simple act of perceiving is sometimes more important than language.

As she lies down at night, she feels her children’s breathing as an unfamiliar yet natural rhythm, as if they were small waves rocking her to sleep. She senses an odd bond between her own impermanence and theirs — everyone is constantly changing and leaving something behind. But perhaps life is not about fixing, holding on or controlling. Perhaps it is about existing in the intervals, the silences and the gestures that escape complete understanding.

In this realisation, she experiences a kind of lightness — not the lightness of forgetfulness, but the lightness of awareness. She feels that she can let go of the world, even if only for a moment, and still remain intact. She can contemplate the improbable: a bird landing on the window, a shadow that corresponds to nothing and a sound that has no name. She can exist without the need to translate, control or anticipate.

Ultimately, she realises that life is made up of gaps: invisible intervals between words, gestures, and decisions. She realises that impermanence is not an enemy, but a companion. She realises that anxiety does not need to be eradicated, but rather perceived as part of the flow. Every step, even if uncertain, is a gesture of freedom.
For the first time in a long time, she smiles — not a smile of victory, but of recognition.
She is present in a world that speaks her language, surrounded by familiar sounds and colours, breathing alongside children, and experiencing her whole life revealing itself in small, surreal moments of simplicity, in details that need no explanation, and in the spaces between everything that passes and everything that remains.

In the distance, a radio plays a song she would recognise anywhere.

“Colour my life with the chaos of trouble, ‘cause anything's better than posh isolation.”

Listen here

There was a distance between them that was not measured in kilometres, but in an invisible gap. They did not know exactly when it began. Perhaps it was on an ordinary morning, when one stopped waiting for the other’s gaze at the café. Or perhaps it was earlier, when they still looked at each other and, secretly, saw nothing but a reflection of themselves. What seems to have happened is that, suddenly, everything became possible without any witnesses to record what was being lost. There was no dramatic breakup, no shouting, no explicit tears; just the feeling that something had changed, without a name, without a date, without justification.

When they parted ways, there was no tragedy. No scene that could be remembered as a milestone. Just silence. That silence spread like dust through their lives, infiltrating the hours without ever announcing itself as anything serious. Like all prolonged silences, this one created its own world, with its own rules, intervals and small certainties. They did not realise they were trapped in this world because they had simply become accustomed to it by living in it. Like someone who learns to walk in a city designed just for them, they learned to coexist in mutual strangeness.

She travelled the world, but every city seemed the same. Wherever she lived, her windows always faced other windows. She worked, met people and created an acceptable existence for herself. But from time to time, an indistinct weight would arise, as if she had forgotten something essential somewhere and couldn’t remember what it was.

In another city, on the other side of the world, he learned to accept absence as a natural part of life. He changed jobs, homes and even the tone of his voice, but with each change, he felt that nothing had really changed. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The reverse of days.

Over the years, they got used to this absence. It was like someone who, after losing a limb, still feels the missing limb: a pain without an object, an impossible gesture. It wasn’t longing because longing requires an image, and they no longer had clear memories of each other. It wasn’t love either, because love loses some of its intensity when spoken about. It was something else. Perhaps it was the awareness that, at some point, two lines could have crossed, but did not. Or that they had crossed briefly, but would only meet again in infinity.

And that what did not happen had shaped their lives.

The world around them continued. They loved other people and experienced other absences. They discovered that time does not heal anything; it just organises chaos more effectively. But in their most intimate moments alone, they knew there was an invisible thread running through the years. A thread that neither pulled nor pushed, but simply remained silent and formed the architecture of their memories. This thread is not nostalgia; it predates memory, as if the spirit had recorded what the flesh could not bear.

Life went on like a river that doesn’t ask if anyone wants to be swept away or not. Every decision seemed inevitable, not because of some manifest destiny, but because of the silent slowness of each choice that accumulates and creates its own pressure. She realised, as she watched the rain slide down the windowpanes, that everyday events always have a way of becoming bigger than they appear. An ordinary afternoon, a cup of tea forgotten on the table, a missed train: everything carried the shadow of something that could not be named. He, alone in his flat, discovered that time is not measured in hours, but in voids. And emptiness is also matter: dense, silent, almost palpable, and with a weight that can be felt in the throat.

For decades, they experienced parallel lives. They each built new stories and involved themselves with people who, upon closer inspection, were only substitutes for what was missing — like a fake painting hung on a wall to fill a real space that was irretrievably empty. Yet there was something that resisted all substitutions: the vague memory not of who the other person was, but of the feeling they left behind — something that could not be captured, explained, or possessed.

She wondered what it would have been like if they had stayed together. Not with sentimental nostalgia, but as a thought experiment: ‘If I had chosen to stay, everything would be different — but would I be less me? Would it be less him?” He had the same thought: ‘If I had stayed, would we have found happiness, or just another kind of absence?’ Then he realised it didn’t matter. What mattered was the presence they never had, but which the mind kept intact, even in absence.

The cities in which they lived seemed to have learned to ignore each other’s presence. Every street, every square and every café was filled with other people, yet the world mysteriously preserved something of what they lacked. Sometimes she would walk into a bookshop and feel as if an empty space had been reserved for him, as if physical space could hold the memory of something that had never been touched. He would walk through a park and feel that a bench had been made for her to sit on, even though that had never happened.

Over the years, the absence ceased to be merely emptiness; it became a kind of awareness and reflection, a silent companion. They realised that they missed not events or people, but a kind of presence — each other’s presence — which could never be captured or explained. They also realised that life, with all its coincidences, decisions, mistakes and encounters, was just a backdrop for that absence to be felt.

The reunion did not happen by chance. It happened in the same way that certain thoughts arise: unexpectedly and silently, with the force of an unquestioned intuition. They met in a narrow museum corridor, each coming from a different room. There was no surprise, no shock. There was only recognition, which requires no words. Words would have been inadequate, even dangerous.

They spoke little. Their conversation was merely a way of confirming that the other person was still there and had not been obliterated by the years. Everything that had not happened was now evident in their presence. The time they had spent apart had become the very argument for their reunion: years of absence, life, choices, loneliness and introspection, all culminating in the realisation that what they had missed was each other — not as objects of desire or memory, but as a way of existing.

There was no dramatic reconciliation. There were no promises. There was no need. Their reunion was an epiphany: they had each completed their lives separately, but they had carried with them the part that the absence of the other had preserved. It was as if life had demanded that they be complete in order to recognise that this completeness only existed together.

When they said goodbye, it was a brief and almost imperceptible gesture, but a definitive one. Neither of them could go back. Life would go on, but now they were aware that the invisible thread spanning decades had a name, a form and a presence. They did not belong to each other in a possessive sense, but in what really mattered: the intangible space of presence that cannot be quantified, replaced or lost. A space of absolute, silent, indestructible intimacy.

And so, each went on with their life differently than before. The absence was no longer a void or an indefinable pain. Instead, it became a living memory, an acute perception and an invisible space that they knew they shared. It was as if all the weight of the years had finally been converted into lightness — not the lightness of forgetting, but the lightness of knowing that, even on separate paths, something united them and justified every choice, every detour and every moment of loneliness.

They finally learned that prolonged absence does not destroy, but reveals. It reveals what really matters and what remains when nothing else does. Ultimately, life is not about having, possessing or understanding; it is about recognising what absence renders essential and realising, in complete silence, that what seemed lost was always within us — in the space that only the other could fill.

It was a grey morning, one of those mornings when light mingles with dust and seems to hesitate before reaching the ground. The wind blew old papers down the street, as if reminding us that everything — people, words, promises — would be swept away sooner or later. Sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, he looked at his hands. He no longer saw the firmness he once had in them, but rather something mechanical; his fingers moved like small, obedient cogs, ready to press buttons, fill out forms and type numbers that belonged to no one, yet somehow governed everyone.

‘Curious,’ he thought. ‘How my whole life has become a succession of repeated gestures rather than my own thoughts. When did I cease to be a man and become just part of a larger machine?’ The kettle whistled on the stove. At other times, this sound might have seemed domestic and welcoming, but now it sounded like a factory signal, a call to duty. Even the steam seemed hurried. No gesture was free from the productive cadence anymore.

On the street, men and women hurried by without inner haste — a haste without destination that leads nowhere real and only keeps the body moving. None of them looked at each other. When they did, it was with a quick, almost imperceptible calculation, as if they were assessing the value and cost of that other person’s existence in seconds. He remembered a time when one could stop and talk to strangers without arousing suspicion. Uselessness was permitted. Today, being useless had become a moral crime. Stopping to watch the sunset was tantamount to admitting unproductivity. ‘Capitalism,’ he thought, ‘does not only rob us of time; it robs us of the possibility of time that is not for sale.’

The cruelest thing was that the poor no longer recognised each other. Each one guarded their mistrust as if it were their birthright. The perfect mechanism was made not only of iron and oil, but also of resentment. But he realised that there was something even deeper: the replacement of contingency with predictability. Life had become an algorithm, and even variations were predicted in advance. Even error had been incorporated as data. This made him uneasy because genuine rupture — the kind that cannot be calculated — had almost disappeared completely.

He didn’t see a face belonging to an enemy. There was no ‘someone’ to fight. The system was not sustained by decree, but by habit. It was a kind of social inertia that renewed itself. The most frightening thing was realising that even criticism of this state of affairs could be absorbed by it. Revolt could become fashionable; rebellion could be sold; and even the idea of freedom could become a packaged product.

As he walked, he reflected that robotisation was not just about being replaced by machines, but about thinking like them — processing inputs and outputs, eliminating pauses and reducing all experience to calculation. A teacher he had had in his youth had said: ‘The problem is not mechanical work; it is mechanical perception. When you only see functions, nothing else can be loved.’ At the time, he did not understand. Now, that phrase repeated itself in his mind like a silent refrain.

The streets were all alike. The shop windows displayed different merchandise, but the structure was the same. The faces varied little, moulded by the same tensions: bills to pay, deadlines to meet, goals to achieve. There was no room for chance. Chance was a waste. He wondered if the absence of chance actually meant the absence of life. After all, to live is to deal with the unexpected; if everything is anticipated, all that remains is repetition. Time loses its depth and days become mere numbers in an uninterrupted sequence.

Capitalism did not present itself as an explicit tyrant, but rather as a climate in which breathing was only possible within certain parameters. Anyone who tried to breathe outside of these parameters would suffocate. Not because it was forbidden — explicit prohibitions generate resistance — but because there was no air. Gradually, he began to notice that he could no longer think slowly. Ideas came rushing in, interrupting each other as if they were afraid of missing an invisible deadline. Even thought had been timed.

And yet, in some rare moments, the opposite happened: a meaningless phrase would pop into his head, a useless memory, a pointless thought that didn’t fit anywhere. These moments made him uneasy, but they also brought him an almost forgotten feeling: that perhaps there was still a piece of his mind that hadn’t been colonised. He then thought that perhaps the ultimate freedom was not to overthrow the system, but to preserve an internal space where nothing had any use. A mental place where value was not measured.

The idea stayed with him for days. He began to observe it as one observes a fragile flame, knowing that any breath could extinguish it. But the world does not like voids. Soon, work, bills, and routine took over everything again. And he realised that the effort to maintain this space was immense, almost as great as the effort to fulfil all his obligations. He knew that the system did not need to break his resistance — it was enough to tire him out until he gave up on his own. And yet there was a strange hope in this fatigue: if everything in the world was calculated for efficiency, perhaps the simple act of tiring himself out trying to preserve a useless thought was, in itself, a kind of sabotage.

On a particularly quiet night, he realised that this useless thought had grown. It had no definite content, but it had form. It was like a bubble of air rising in a murky lake: unlikely, but inevitable. And for the first time in a long time, he fell asleep with the feeling that he did not belong entirely to the machine. The next day, the city was the same. The faces, the same. The tasks, the same. But something, invisibly, was no longer the same. For although she still walked within the gears, she carried with her a particle that she could not process. A particle without function, without price, without goal. And, however small it was, she knew that it was there that she still existed.

The following days passed by at the same pace, but he began to notice small cracks appearing. A meaningless conversation on the tram, a memory that popped up for no reason, or a moment spent admiring a falling leaf. Each of these small interruptions was proof that, however corrupt human life might be, it still had dimensions that could not be translated into productivity. This realisation brought him a mixture of despair and consolation: mental disorder was still possible.

He remembered children playing in a square and realised that even these games were not entirely free from external logic. There was a sense of urgency in their movements, an implicit calculation and an unconscious awareness that time was limited and that even fun had to have some kind of impact, whether social or educational. Capitalism dominated not only the lives of adults, but also the imaginations of children.

He then began to observe people’s microgestures: the way a worker adjusted his watch; the calculated care with which a saleswoman stacked goods; and the quick glances of people trying not to waste time in queues. Every detail seemed designed so that no thought went unapplied and no emotion escaped unrecorded. Thus, humanity became functionality.

And yet, even in this state, some perceptions escaped control. A moment of silence on the street, an unexpected word or an old smell were small setbacks that could not be incorporated into the machinery. He began to value these moments as invisible treasures, remembering that, however structured and calculated the world seemed, it still contained indomitable elements.

At the end of the week, he sat in the same grey room reflecting on everything he had observed. He concluded that the most dangerous machine was not made of metal or electricity, but operated within each human consciousness as an internal logic of efficiency, calculation and self-demand that transformed humans into automatons. However, he also realised that, however small, there was an essential core that could not be replaced: the space for useless contemplation, for thought that produces nothing and perception that serves no purpose.

The following night, before going to sleep, he looked out of the window. The city moved at its usual, predictable pace, but he felt different: he felt a sense of belonging not to the system, but to himself. The invisible inner core persisted. He could not dominate it, nor could the system imprison it. It was a fragment of freedom that could not be quantified. For the first time, he felt that he had survived not despite, but within capitalism, preserving the part of his humanity that external logic could never reach.