The Emptiness – 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 behind 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 its holder, untouched, like so many things in your life wait. The streets retreat indifferently behind the windshield. Everything moves, but not you. Or maybe you do, 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 any 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, loose words in your agenda without landing in your thoughts. And somewhere, like a vague background noise, lurks the realization that you’ve 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 razor thin, but you don’t have time to feel that now. The car vibrates beneath you, the 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 shock. A speed bump you didn’t see—or didn’t want to see.