The Void Might Leave You on Read
It is not merely the dissolution of the relationship that haunts the psyche; it is the retroactive auditing of the time spent within it. Sitting across from N yesterday, a rather brutal phenomenological truth materialized: the sheer, insulting brevity of it all. A few hours together? It registers as a statistical rounding error in the grand scheme of a life. When you hold up the actual, lived hours against the monumental weight of the emotional investment, the math is frankly offensive. It leaves one bargaining with the universe for just one more week. One more.
What I am experiencing is a textbook collision with Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée - the agonizing difference between objective, clock-time and subjective, lived time. A week in the mundane world is 168 hours of waking, sleeping, and paying taxes. But a week with her? That is a hyper-dense, temporal singularity. The realization that I desperately want to inhabit that singularity again - just to exist in the quiet, tactile reality of her presence, to hug, to touch, to simply be - brought actual, unscripted tears to my eyes. A fascinating biological betrayal, really. I was entirely unaware my stoic architecture was capable of such a structural collapse.
Yet, as the tears dry, the intellectual skepticism inevitably kicks in. Am I lying to myself? I am already mentally auditing the last time we supposedly spent "a week" together. My brain immediately files a grievance: Well, she had to go to her job, so it wasn't a "real" week. Let us appreciate the sheer, tragicomic absurdity of this nitpicking. I am no longer asking for reality; I am chasing a Platonic Ideal. I want the Form of the Perfect Week - a hermetically sealed, utopian vacuum entirely insulated from the grotesque demands of capitalism, schedules, and everyday existence.
And now, the ultimate epistemological paralysis: How do I communicate this? Should I communicate this? To speak it aloud requires an immediate, terrifying confrontation with her agency. So, I retreat to the grand tradition of Kierkegaardian melancholics and brooding romantics everywhere: I will write it down. By transforming this raw, desperate plea into text, I am deferring the vulnerability. I will cast this manifesto of longing into the void, hoping she reads it, hoping her subjective experience of our shared time aligns with mine, and hoping she responds.
Or maybe she won't. I don't know. The only certainty in this entire ontological mess is the writing itself.