for the hollow
Read one at randomNot sad, exactly. Not anything, exactly. There's a specific flatness that shows up late at night, and these stories are written from inside it.
Feeling empty is hard to describe without sounding dramatic, which is why most descriptions of it fail. The stories here work small instead. A kitchen at 3am with nothing wrong in it and nothing right either. A person scrolling without registering a single post. The group chat that used to be loud, still muted, nobody noticing. A shower taken at the wrong hour just to have done something. Flatness lives in details like these, and naming the details is the closest language gets to it.
Nothing in this feed will try to cheer you up. No arcs of healing, no lesson in the last paragraph. Each story just sits where you're sitting and describes the room honestly, and then one line near the end catches on something real. Oddly, that helps more than encouragement does. Being described accurately is a kind of company.
If you're wondering whether reading about flatness makes flatness worse, fair question. It doesn't seem to work that way. Encouragement bounces off this feeling because encouragement argues with it, and it doesn't argue back, it just sits there. Description gets underneath it. A story that renders the exact texture of a numb evening proves that someone else has been in this room and left again, which is quiet evidence the room has a door. That's all these stories claim. It's more than it sounds like at 3am.
They take about two minutes each. Read one, or several, or just let the page sit open in the dark. If the hollow feeling has a direction tonight, the reflective mood is quieter and turned inward, and the existential category asks the bigger versions of the same questions.
Mid call, a text says the ceiling's leaking at home. I finish in my customer service voice and can't find my real one after.
I went back for my charger and found someone else already settled into my old desk. I still check her status every night, like it's still my job.
The old friend group's reunion poll closes in eleven minutes, and the diner we always picked isn't one of the options anymore.
the schedule went up on the corkboard tonight and the last week just keeps going without my name in it.
an old friend's dinner ended earlier than it used to, and i sat in the car after, not sure why i couldn't make myself drive home.
at dinner my sister said she basically raised me, and i drove the long way home adding it to a list i'll never use.
they let me stay past visiting hours because nobody else is on the ward.
The fridge is full of other people's casserole dishes. Everyone cried today but me. I keep waiting to feel it.
The silver car's dome light is on now. It wasn't before. Someone opened a door, and I haven't seen it close.
Nobody does laundry at 3am because they have to. I think I just wanted somewhere with light and a sound that wasn't my own head.
Four of us split a password in college. Her profile's still there, a show paused in april, and I didn't text her.
There's a kid's sock on the folding table that isn't mine. The place has been empty the whole hour, and I keep watching the door.
They cut the second closer. Now it's just me, the walk-in, and a checkmark for a goodbye.
He's away till Thursday and I've been counting the nights like good ones. There's a thing I wouldn't say with the lights on.
We shared a room till I was twelve and talked in the dark every night. Now the most recent thing between us is a heart on a photo of my dog.
He's asleep beside me, alarm set like always. We don't fight. I scrolled up through two years of texts looking for the day it all thinned out.
My sister got married and sat me eight tables from the family. I had all my anger ready. Then I just sat there with the dress over the chair.
Last one on the office floor, a two-line resignation that won't leave the drafts, and a mug from a company that doesn't exist anymore.
I live alone now but my hands still measure for two, and I can't seem to stop.
I know the man upstairs only by sound. Tonight there was the first shoe, and then nothing came after it.
Half past two, cold floor through my socks, standing in the kitchen I came down to for no reason at all.
A short note about the hallway light at 3am.