… 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.