The corridors are still there - though they seem longer now, stretching beyond the reach of thought. I walk them without destination, guided less by intention than by habit. The absence moves with me, not as a figure but as a question. It does not accuse - it simply persists. What have you misplaced? it asks. I search my pockets and find only echoes.
I never held the thing I grieve, and yet I feel displaced by it - as though I have stepped aside to make room for a possibility that never arrived. There is a peculiar vertigo in mourning what never was. It unsettles the foundations. If nothing tangible has been lost, why does the ground feel altered? Why does each choice appear slightly misaligned, as though I am forever one degree off centre?
Grief without an object becomes philosophical. It turns into inquiry. It peers into the structure of being and whispers - what is possession, truly? What is absence? I attempt to answer, but language feels blunt. Words circle the void and return empty-handed. I begin to suspect that the phantom is not a missing thing, but the outline of a self I cannot quite inhabit.
Perhaps this is what it means to be lost - not stranded in darkness, but suspended between versions of oneself. The life before me unfolds, measurable and real, yet I feel the pull of another rhythm beneath it - a silent metronome marking time for a song never written. I move forward, but not entirely convinced of the direction.
And so I walk - not towards resolution, but alongside uncertainty. The absence no longer startles me. It has become the horizon - always ahead, never reached. In acknowledging that I cannot recover what never existed, I confront something quieter and more unsettling - that the search itself may be the only constant I possess.