In remembrance of emotions

I watch a child crying in the coffee shop. Full meltdown - tears, snot, the works. Her mother is desperately trying to quiet her, shooting apologetic looks at other customers. Two years ago, I'd have felt something - sympathy, annoyance, anything. Now I just calculate how long it would take for someone to notice if she stopped breathing.These thoughts should disturb me. They don't.The screen of my laptop reflects my face, overlaid on endless scrolling images of war zones and natural disasters. I can't tell which is more dead - the corpses in the news feeds or my eyes watching them. I click through photos of bombed hospitals with the same interest I'd give a furniture catalog. Somewhere in my mind, a voice whispers that this isn't normal, that I should feel horror, revulsion, grief. But that voice gets weaker every day.Maria would be disgusted by what I've become. The thought produces a flicker of... something. Not pain exactly. More like the phantom limb sensation of where pain should be.I close my eyes, remembering the last time I saw her. She was screaming, tears streaming down her face, pieces of our shattered life scattered across the floor. I just stood there, already gone, watching her like I was observing an interesting physics experiment - the trajectory of tears, the frequency of sobs, the decay rate of love into nothing."You're fucking dead inside!" she screamed. "Look at yourself! LOOK AT YOURSELF!"I did. I am. There's nothing to see.The numbness crept in so slowly I barely noticed. Like watching frost spread across a window, crystallizing everything into unrecognizable patterns. First the small emotions went - simple irritations, minor joys. Then the bigger ones started to fade. Even rage, my last reliable companion, eventually froze over.Now I move through life like a robot running outdated software. I say the right things, make the appropriate facial expressions, perform the expected gestures. I've gotten good at it. Too good. Sometimes I catch myself practicing smiles in the mirror, cataloging the exact angle of eyebrows and lips needed to convey specific emotions. It's become a game - how well can I fake being human?The child in the coffee shop is still crying. I take a sip of my coffee, gone cold hours ago. The bitter liquid hits my stomach like acid, but it's something to feel. These days, I chase physical sensations - scalding showers, too-hot coffee, the burn of alcohol. They're poor substitutes for actual feelings, but they remind me I still have nerve endings, even if my soul is dead.My phone buzzes. Another message from someone who still thinks I'm salvageable. I don't bother reading it. They're all the same - concerned friends, family members, each convinced they have the magic words to bring me back to life. They don't understand that this isn't depression. Depression is feeling too much. This is feeling nothing at all.I open my laptop again, muscle memory typing in her name. Her social media is a timeline of healing - new friends, new hobbies, new life. She's moved on, while I'm still here, a ghost haunting the ruins of who I used to be. I scroll through photos of her smiling, laughing, living, and try to remember what it felt like to be the person who loved her.The really fucked up part? I don't even miss her. I miss missing her. I miss the ability to feel loss, to feel anything at all. The absence of emotion has become its own kind of emotion - a void so complete it has weight, presence, character.Sometimes I wonder if this is how serial killers start. But even that requires passion, drive, something to fill the emptiness. I don't even have that. I'm just here, consuming oxygen, taking up space, watching the world through a plate glass window that gets thicker every day.The crying child finally leaves with her mother. The coffee shop settles into its usual quiet hum. I stare at my reflection in the darkened window, superimposed over the street outside. A perfect metaphor - transparent yet present, existing in two places and nowhere at all.I should go home. My apartment waits, a mausoleum of better days. Empty walls where our photos used to hang. Empty closet where her clothes used to be. Empty bed where we used to love. Empty human where I used to be.But I don't move. The coffee shop will close eventually, force me out into the night. Until then, I sit, a black hole in human form, absorbing light and life and reflecting nothing back. My screen flickers with more atrocities, more disasters, more evidence that the world is as dead as I am.I take another sip of cold coffee and think about the precise angle of a reassuring smile. Tomorrow I'll wake up and do this all again. And again. And again. Not living, not dying, just existing in this liminal space between humanity and void.Maria was wrong. I'm not dead inside.The dead don't know they're dead. The dead don't fake smiles or chase sensation or calculate the time it would take for someone to notice a stopped breath.The dead don't sit in coffee shops, remembering how to feel.The dead don't wish they were dead.I'm something worse. I'm aware of my own emptiness, conscious of my own void. A walking paradox - too dead to live, too alive to die. This is my purgatory, my personal hell. Eternally watching, eternally empty, eternally aware of my own emptiness.The screen flickers. Another disaster. Another war. Another day.I don't feel a thing.