On the Empty Apartment That Is Not Empty

How many times have you woken within these four walls?
Listening to them, to confirm that you exist.
Does anyone think of you now?
You touch your skin — warm, yet alien.
The warmth of a person you never knew.

The solitude of absence.
No other bodies within your field.
And sounds not made by you.
And eyes that might have seen you.

Find people. Flee the home. Dress yourself in another.
This you will do.
But then it continues —
You are again among empty walls.

The presence of others does not fill the absence.
It merely masks and delays.
Creating the illusion: “I am not alone.”

It demands maintenance, then returns — visible and irremovable.
The solitude of absence is not a problem of relationships.
Emptiness — not a container, but a structure.
The manner in which you are present in the world.
And this manner does not change with the number of bodies around.

In the crowd and in love, you feel this.
For “nearness” is your capacity to hold attention on what unfolds.
When the effort is weak, you do not feel the presence of others.
More people — only more reminders of the impossibility of connection.

You and the other — merely positions.
They do not touch, but stand adjacent.
The body remembers your tension.
The density in which forms once became transparent.

And one day you will open emptiness to yourself.
And see that it is not empty.
Within your four walls, something exists.
Not you, nor thoughts of it, nor memory.
But presence without an address.

You are right to call this horror.
For there is no one to experience it, and no position of defense.

“Oh, how I understand you” — you will finally say to another.

You are forced to become aware —
A process that asked no permission
And received no refusal,
For there was no one to refuse it.

Seek people no more, you, the operator.
Hold the tension and walk through the emptiness.
Make use of voluntary suffering.
And say finally:
Not “I suffer because I am alone.”
But “solitude is a structure,
And I am the tension within its space.”