The void -a second note-.

You wake up with a start before the day has called you. The darkness still hangs languidly around you, as if the night refuses to leave. The room breathes silence, only the soft ticking of the heater suggests that the world still exists. Your eyes search for the ceiling, which floats in the vague light like an endless horizon. The alarm clock, set for an absurdly early time, remains silent. You are ahead of time, but not through victory—rather through an almost submissive surrender to the unnameable.

Under the covers, your feet feel chilly, as if they’re in a different season than the rest of your body. An everyday discomfort, and yet it becomes a symbol of something bigger. Something you can’t grasp. It’s like looking down on your own life from a great height—a tiny figure in a landscape of expectations and missed opportunities.

The lost friendship that has been lurking in your mind for weeks seems heavier at this hour. Not because anything has changed, but because silence magnifies everything. The absence of another’s words hangs like a forgotten coat on the edge of your thoughts. How often do you still write messages in your head that are never sent? How often does the glitch lie in the desire to repair something, while you know that some stories cannot be rewritten?

Love remains a riddle that you try to solve again and again, but that eludes any solution. Just as you now hesitate whether to get out of bed or stay in bed—caught between the urge to move and the fear of starting the day. An empty carton of milk may still be waiting in the fridge. A silent reminder of how often the small mixes with the large. A simple act, like lifting a box empty of contents, but with the weight of what is missing.

You think of the times you’ve stood on a bus or train and couldn’t find your public transport card. The panic of a second can seem bigger than losing a conversation or a familiar face. Everything happens faster than you want. The loss and the things that become unfindable—the smallest symbols of how we sometimes feel entangled in something we don’t understand ourselves.

Addiction is another kind of getting lost. An urge to disappear for a while in a world without questions, where advertising in games not only tries to seduce us, but also adds noise to what should be clear. Every click, every reward an echo of what you miss: simplicity, connection, meaning.

And then there is the postponement of everything that once started as a promise to yourself. The work you were supposed to finish. The letter you wanted to write. The appointment you kept putting off because you weren’t “ready” yet. But what is finished anyway? The thought keeps circling, like a planet in a vacuum, a seemingly perfect orbit that only seems to have meaning from a distance. Up close, you can see the cracks in the surface.

Maybe emptiness isn’t even a matter of absence. It’s the edge of things. The place where a flat tire on a rainy day makes you question your own planning, your own grip on the world. A delay that goes far beyond your destination—a question that burrows into your soul through small incidents.

You look at the silhouettes of your own thoughts and realize: even in the void there is presence. An imperfect presence perhaps, but no less real for that. You live on the edge of your own story, in a time that no one can explain to you. And yet, as you lie there for a moment with your cold feet and your confused head, you feel how every breath connects you to something that does not need to be named.

Maybe that’s what we’re looking for: not to overcome emptiness, but to learn to see what’s on its edges. The moment before the day begins, before the alarm goes off, is a reminder that nothing is ever really “done.” Only in progress.