The Void -a fourth note-

You woke up too late. No time to think about how the morning should have gone, no time to put right something that was left undone yesterday. You grabbed the coffee from the counter, more a symbol of control than an actual need. It’s too cold to really get warm, too weak to really wake up. In the car, the cup waits in the holder, untouched, like so many things in your life wait.

The streets retreat indifferently behind the windshield. Everything moves, but you don’t. Or maybe you do, but you move, but without direction, without a sense of destination. In the side mirrors, the places you were just now disappear, like memories that erase themselves before they have meaning.

Some days start with a mistake that dictates the rest, a false start after which all you can do is run without really moving forward. This is one of those days. Too late, too fast, too absent. Today's appointments seem abstract, random words in your agenda without landing in your thoughts. And somewhere, like a vague noise in the background, lurks the realization that you have forgotten to answer someone again. A friendship that slowly dissolves into a series of unanswered messages. The line between too busy and too distant is wafer-thin, but you don't have time to feel that now.

The car vibrates beneath you, asphalt stretches out like a monotonous river, without bends, without surprises. You could drive here every day and it wouldn’t make a difference. As if the route isn’t a road, but a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. The radio is playing something, probably an advertisement. Yet another promise that something will make your life better if you just click, buy, believe. You tune it out.

Then a jolt. A speed bump you didn’t see—or didn’t want to see. The coffee, that silent witness to this morning, rises momentarily from the cup holder, hovers like an inevitable fate, and then pours onto your lap, onto the upholstery, onto everything that had been dry and intact until now. A sticky, lukewarm reminder of what should have been comforting.

You exhale, a fraction too deeply, as if you could erase something with it. But nothing just disappears.

Maybe that’s why it feels so familiar. The way small things can crack, how something meant to be held slips through your fingers. Like a lost public transport pass, only missed when you need it. Like a flat tire on a day when you don’t have time for delays. Like a love that slowly turns into a series of polite greetings and silences that no one fills.

You wonder why you even try—that balance between holding on and letting go, between expecting and forgetting. Procrastination increasingly feels like a way to keep things at bay, as if by not finishing anything you maintain the illusion that anything is still possible. But it never really works. The piles of unopened messages, unfinished plans, unspoken words build up to something bigger than you ever intended to collect.

The world outside goes on. Cars pass you by, people who seem to be going somewhere, purposefully, as if they do know. Maybe they don't. Maybe in every car there's someone with a spilled coffee, a vague disappointment that has no name, an undefined feeling of loss.

The vacuum of the universe is nothing more than the emptiness that sometimes resides within yourself—it’s the edge you keep running into, the absence of something you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. You remember a documentary about galaxies and how vast everything is, how much space there is between what we can see. An incomprehensible void, bigger than anything you can possibly comprehend. But it’s not the size that bothers you. It’s that it was always there, and always will be.

Maybe that’s why death sometimes strikes you in the smallest moments—not in the ending, but in the spaces between. In a forgotten appointment, a cold carton of milk in the fridge, a question never answered. In the way you’re sometimes not sure if you closed a door, or if there was a door at all.

The coffee slowly seeps into the fabric of the seat. The smell lingers. Somewhere in this moment, there’s a choice: you can worry about it, you can try to clean something that might already leave a stain, or you can just keep driving. Maybe there’s no right choice. Maybe the only thing you can do is keep going, even if you’re not sure where you’re going.

The traffic light changes from red to flashing orange.