This happened some time ago, on an ordinary morning. I was commuting to the office—no special occasion, no hurry, no urgent meeting waiting on the other side. I was breaking orbit—leaving the home office to actually see people in 3D. A rare occurrence.
On the way, I stopped at a traffic signal near the metro station. The trains run overhead here, so you can see them clearly—coming, going, sliding in and out of view like some effortless machinery of the sky.
As I waited at the red light, an empty train glided in. Completely empty. And something in me pinched: Ah, missed it.
It made no sense. Another train arrives every five minutes, and every alternate one starts from this very station—empty trains are not rare at all. I had all day. Waiting ten more minutes wouldn’t have changed a single thing in the shape of my morning.
And yet, for a brief moment, I felt a real sense of missing out. Not dramatic, not long-lasting, but unmistakably real—like a small muscle tightening somewhere inside. The feeling passed quickly, but the question stayed: what exactly had I missed?
I wonder how many times this happens in a day—these tiny false-losses that flicker through us unnoticed. Moments where the body reacts as if something slipped away, even though nothing was ever ours to lose. A phantom ache for a phantom event.
Maybe the mind can’t tolerate a gap. It fills every neutral moment with an imagined alternative: a train I could have caught, a timing I almost made, a version of the day that briefly existed in imagination and then dissolved without consequence.
And then I mourn that dissolved version, as if it had ever been real.
What interests me is not the specific instance but the mechanism behind it—the quiet machinery of expectation and comparison that keeps running beneath awareness. It’s as if the mind is constantly generating micro-scenarios, laying out faint, almost-invisible possibilities, and then reacting to their disappearance with the same reflex it uses for real loss. A kind of shadow arithmetic of what might have been.
This moment was mine: a day with no urgency, no consequence, and still a sting of loss. A loss that wasn’t even a loss.
The unsettling part is that this was just one instance where I happened to catch myself in the act. One tiny flicker that surfaced long enough for me to notice it. There are probably hundreds of such moments scattered through a day, slipping under awareness—the rush of “almost,” the pinch of “just missed,” the faint melancholy of arriving a heartbeat too late to something that never really mattered.
Individually they’re nothing, but together they form a sort of emotional sediment: a low, constant sense of having fallen behind in ways we can’t name. An accumulated sorrow with no actual event behind it.
How do you resolve a deficit that isn’t real? I’m not sure you can. You cannot reclaim an object that never existed; there is nothing to retrieve, nothing to fix.
Leave a Reply