I'm two weeks late writing this. I want to say that plainly before anything else, because the lateness is part of it, not separate from it. This journal is supposed to come out weekly. It didn't. And for most of those two weeks I told myself the reason was ordinary — tired, busy, nothing to say. It wasn't until much later that I had a word for what was actually going on. Kosong. Empty. Not sad, not stressed, nothing with a name that fits neatly into a sentence. Just empty, in a way that took me two weeks to even recognize as a feeling rather than a mood I'd wander out of on its own.
It started, as far as I can trace it, around the time the Light Pixie went quiet. Nothing ended between us — there was nothing to end. We were friends, nothing more, no promises made or broken. But she had been part of my days for a few months, in the ordinary way someone becomes part of your days without either of you deciding it formally — a call here, a message there, the small habit of narrating your afternoon to someone who's listening. And then, slowly, she wasn't. The calls stopped. The messages thinned out until they were rare, then rarer, then mostly gone. Nothing dramatic. Just a door that got quieter and quieter until I couldn't tell anymore whether it was still open.
I live alone here, in a kingdom that still isn't quite mine no matter how long I stay in it. The days have a shape to them — the same work, the same walk home, the same room waiting at the end of it — and for a while, she had been the one variable in that shape, the one part of the day that didn't repeat itself exactly. When she went quiet, the shape stayed the same, but something inside it changed. I noticed the absence before I understood it.
My first instinct was to assume I knew what this was. I missed her. That seemed obvious enough not to question. So I did what a person does when they think they know the diagnosis — I went looking for the opposite of missing someone. I went outward. I let myself be loud for a while, the extroverted version of me that mostly stays folded up here. I posted more. I talked to strangers. I told people what I was going through, asked to meet up, said yes to plans I'd normally avoid. I even went back to an old project of mine, one I'd shelved years ago, thinking maybe reviving it would give this feeling somewhere useful to go.
None of it worked the way I expected. Not because the people weren't good company, or the project wasn't interesting — they were, it was — but because underneath all of it, in the exact same place, the emptiness was still there. Untouched. It didn't shrink when the room got louder. It didn't leave when I got home tired and satisfied from a good conversation. I'd walk back into my apartment at the end of one of those nights and there it would be, waiting in the same spot, like it had never actually left to begin with.
That's the part that started to bother the story I'd been telling myself. If this were really about missing her, shouldn't it have responded, even a little, to being around other people? Shouldn't some of it have eased? Instead it just sat there, patient, indifferent to whoever I brought into the room. And slowly, without any single moment I can point to as the turning point, a different question started forming underneath the first one. Not "who do I miss," but "was this space even hers to begin with."
I don't think it was. I think — and I say this carefully, because I'm still not sure I trust it yet — the space was there before her. She didn't dig it out of me. She happened to stand in it for a while, the way people do, and for those few months I mistook her presence for the absence of a hole that had actually been there the whole time, underneath, waiting. When she stepped back, she didn't take anything with her. She just stopped covering something up.
I've met a handful of people like her over the years — the ones I've started thinking of as light creatures, for lack of a better word — people who arrive, burn warmly for a season, and then move on without any particular drama attached to it. I used to think each time one of them left, I lost something. Now I'm less sure. Maybe what actually happens is smaller and stranger than losing someone. Maybe they just each, briefly, stand in front of the same door, and I keep mistaking the door for them.
I don't know what's actually behind that door. That's the part I keep circling and not landing on. Some nights it feels social — like I'm simply a person living far from home, without enough people around me, and the ache is just loneliness wearing a complicated outfit. Other nights it feels like something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with company at all, something closer to a hunger that no conversation, however good, could ever actually satisfy. I don't have the vocabulary to name that second feeling properly. The closest word I have is spiritual, but I'm not fully comfortable with the word either — it sounds bigger than what I'm actually experiencing, or maybe exactly the right size and I just haven't grown used to hearing it applied to myself.
I read a few things during those two weeks, the kind of writing that tells you exactly how to fill a space like this — steps, habits, a checklist for un-emptying yourself. I tried some of it, half-heartedly. It didn't take. Not because the advice was wrong, necessarily, but because it assumed the emptiness was a problem with an item missing from it, something you could shop for and slot in. What I was feeling didn't behave like that. It behaved like weather. It came, sat, and didn't seem interested in being solved.
So somewhere in the second week I stopped trying to talk it out of existing. I let a night be quiet without reaching for my phone to fix it. I let myself feel the emptiness the way I'd let myself feel anything else — without immediately deciding it was a symptom of something that needed correcting. It didn't get smaller. But it stopped feeling like an emergency, which is not the same thing as feeling resolved.
I'm writing this two weeks later than I should have, still inside the feeling I'm trying to describe. I don't think it's gone. I don't think naming it correctly made it leave. If anything, naming it just moved the question somewhere else — from her, to the shape of what's actually missing, which I still can't see clearly enough to describe. Is it people I need more of. Is it something further out than people, something I haven't found language for yet. I go back and forth most days. I don't think I'm going to land on an answer tonight, and I'm not sure I should force one.
For now I'm just sitting with it, in the room I live in alone, still deciding what it is I'm actually looking at.