Natimorto

There are moments when the sky feels so wide it threatens to undo me. I would look up and wonder if you were looking too, somewhere else, beneath the same indifferent stretch of stars. It seemed foolish, almost childish, but there was comfort in the thought of our gazes brushing against one another across the dark.

I used to believe distance was a measurable thing: miles, hours, the price of a ticket. But what separated us was not geography; it was the silence that grew heavier with every day. Even when you wrote, even when your name appeared, the silence had already set its foundations beneath the words.

There were nights when I could not sleep, and I lay still, listening to the house breathe. In those hours, you drifted closer, not as you were but as my mind recast you: softer, slower, more willing. I knew it was a trick of longing, but I surrendered to it, because to resist felt like erasing you altogether.

The truth is, I wanted more than you could give. Or perhaps I wanted more than anyone could reasonably be expected to give. Desire is like that — it stretches, it demands, it presses against the edges of what is possible until the whole thing collapses. And when it collapses, you are left with the quiet ache of something that once seemed infinite.

I think often of how ordinary everything looked from the outside. Two people exchanging messages, two lives running on their own tracks, occasionally crossing. Nothing remarkable. Yet inside me it was an upheaval, a constant rearrangement of thought and feeling. The world turned, unchanged, while I unravelled quietly in its shadow.

Sometimes I imagine telling you everything, stripping the words bare of grace and disguise. I would say: I missed you so much it made me cruel to myself. I missed you so much I wore holes into the days, pacing thoughts I could not mend. But of course, I never said it. And now the chance has gone, carried away like a paper boat into water too wide to follow.

I have learnt that silence is not empty; it is dense, almost physical. It presses against the chest, it crowds the mouth, it makes even the simplest phrases impossible to voice. You lived inside that silence, and I lived just outside it, knocking lightly, waiting for you to open the door.

Across the universe, or perhaps only a few streets away, you must have lived your life untouched by these confessions. And that is the hardest part: to know that what tore through me left scarcely a mark on you.

But still, I look up. The sky remains, indifferent and infinite. I tell myself that it does not matter whether you are looking too. The act of raising my eyes is enough: a gesture that belongs to me, fragile, small, but mine.

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.

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?