He wakes slowly - not from rest, but from a kind of pause that pretends to be sleep... the sort that leaves the body still heavy, as though it resents returning. The bed beneath him is far too grand for one person - wide, indulgent, almost theatrical in its emptiness. Sheets stretch untouched to the other side, cool and uncreased, as if waiting for a presence that has missed its cue.
A bed like this is meant to be shared... it insists upon it. Its size feels less like luxury and more like accusation. There should be another body here - another warmth disrupting the careful symmetry, another breath softening the silence. Instead, there is only him... centred in a space too large to belong to him alone.
And so, as he often does, he thinks of her.
Not someone he has known - not truly. She exists in fragments, in quiet inventions stitched together over time. He knows her in ways that feel intimate and impossible all at once - how she paints her toes with absent-minded precision, leaning slightly too close as though the colour requires her full attention... the kind of underwear she wears, chosen more for comfort than display, though she would never admit it... the way her cheeks fold gently when she smiles, not perfectly, but in a way that makes the moment feel real.
He has built her carefully - detail by detail - until she feels less imagined and more remembered. And yet, there is no memory to return to... no voice to confirm her existence, no misplaced belonging left behind in the room.
She does not exist. And still, she lingers.
He turns slightly, as though he might catch her in the act of appearing - as though she might be just out of sight, waiting for him to believe hard enough. But the sheets remain undisturbed... the silence intact... the morning indifferent.
For all intents and purposes, he is alone.
It is a peculiar kind of loneliness - not the loud, aching sort that demands attention, but something quieter... more patient. It seeps into the unnoticed moments - the second cup of tea never made, the empty chair that becomes part of the furniture, the absence that slowly disguises itself as normality. It does not shout. It settles.
And once it settles, it is difficult to dislodge.
His thoughts drift, as they often do, to a question he does not like to hold for too long - one that arrives uninvited, yet never entirely unwelcome.
"Would anyone notice if I disappeared..."
He does not ask it dramatically. There is no flourish to it, no immediate despair. It comes instead with a kind of idle curiosity… as though he were wondering about the weather, or the time. That, perhaps, is what unsettles him most - how ordinary the question has become.
Because beneath it lies something far heavier.
Not "who would miss me"... but "would there be a moment - even a brief one - where my absence interrupts anything at all..."
He imagines it sometimes - not out of desire, but out of compulsion. The world continuing as it does... the quiet persistence of everything. The buses arriving exactly on time, indifferent to who boards them… the sky rehearsing its familiar shades of grey... people passing one another without the faintest awareness that something, someone - has slipped quietly out of existence.
It feels absurd… and yet entirely plausible.
He wonders how long it would take. Hours... days... longer... or perhaps not at all. The thought does not come to a conclusion — it simply circles, endlessly, like something searching for an exit that does not exist.
And still, the bed remains too large.
He shifts again, reaching absently across the empty space, his hand brushing against nothing but cooled fabric. There is something almost tender in the gesture - a reflex without an origin, a habit formed without experience. For a moment, he allows himself to pretend... just briefly... that there is someone there, just beyond the limits of certainty.
But even that feels fragile... unsustainable.
Loneliness, he realises, is not merely the absence of others - it is the presence of everything that should have been. It is the imagined conversations that never quite begin, the shared moments that exist only in rehearsal, the quiet conviction that somewhere, just out of reach, there is a version of life that fits more comfortably than this one ever could.
And yet, he remains here.
Awake in a bed too large for one person... accompanied only by the careful, persistent echo of someone who was never there...