The Void Between Heartbeats

The call comes at 4:37 in the morning. Kuala Lumpur is still dark, the skyline a smear of dim lights occasionally fractured by lightning. Rain assaults the hotel window like accusations, thunder punctuating the silence with judgment. My phone vibrates against the nightstand—a Swiss country code. For twenty seconds, I stare at it, recognizing the geography of rejection. Years of silence have trained me to expect nothing from that part of the world except more wounds.

"Hello?" My voice, thick with sleep and ancient defenses.

A clinical pause, then a voice I barely recognize. "Your mother passed away this afternoon."

Ten thousand kilometers away, in a Swiss clinic, the woman who birthed me has died. The mother who excised me from her life with the precision of someone removing a tumor, whose final words to me had been administrative at best. The mother who, with my father as her surgical assistant, had severed our relationship, cutting away the malignancy I represented—the renegade, the disappointment, the genetic anomaly in their blueprint for continuity.

I hang up without ceremony and lie perfectly still. The room absorbs my presence without acknowledging it. The world continues its indifferent orbit.

For an hour, I don't move. The air conditioning hums its white noise eulogy beneath the intermittent accusations of thunder. Rain continues its assault, sometimes in gentle reminders, sometimes in violent recriminations. Fourteen floors up, the city's morning awakening happens in silence—urban struggles muted by distance, glass, and meteorological tantrums that match my internal barometer. I remain motionless, suspended between the clinical fact of my mother's death and the cavernous reality that I feel nothing yet everything simultaneously. My body seems both leaden with inherited guilt and weightless with orphaned liberation. I check my pulse at the wrist, pressing two fingers against skin that feels like borrowed property. The beat is steady, methodical. The body persists when the mind fractures.

I rise at last and stand at the window, watching the skyline slowly expose itself. I press my palm against the glass. It's cool and slick with condensation, the only tangible thing in a moment that feels like someone else's hallucination. The train station below—functional, certain of its purpose—mocks the paralysis spreading through my nervous system. Every person moving through the terminal has somewhere they belong. I have nowhere that would recognize my presence.

Two days separate her passing from the fight I'd spent two years clawing toward—my return to the ring after what had felt like professional excommunication. Now I will miss both—the fight and the funeral—though I'm sure my name was never inked on the latter's invitation list.

The thought arrives with the sudden clarity of a perfect punch landing: I cannot fight. Not tomorrow, not ever. The comeback I've constructed, the identity I've rebuilt from salvaged parts—none of it matters anymore. What's worse, like a truth serum finally taking effect, I'm not sure it ever did. If this doesn't matter—this thing I've grafted onto my skin like artificial purpose—then what does?

The answer that follows is even more brutal than the question: nothing.

By noon, I've fled Kuala Lumpur. Not to Switzerland, where my mother's body lies in a cold morgue. Not to Singapore, where friends might offer the awkward consolation of someone watching a stranger drown. I have the luxury, the perverted privilege of choice—financially able to go anywhere in the world, yet having nowhere that would notice my absence. I choose Bangkok—anonymous, sprawling, indifferent Bangkok—where I can disappear into human static, where no one knows me or expects anything from me, where I can vanish if the darkness that's been stalking me since childhood finally consumes the last scraps of whoever I pretended to be.

There is a particular texture to true isolation—not the curated solitude that people flaunt on social media, but the bone-deep aloneness that comes from having no one to witness your existence. My grief has no audience, my pain no validators. Without the scaffolding of family or friends nearby, I have nothing to prevent the collapse inward, nothing to stop the implosion that's been decades in the making.

In Bangkok, invisibility becomes my most reliable companion. I live in hotels now, moving through these temporary spaces like a ghost—the ultimate expression of a life without roots, family, or permanent address. Each room is an exercise in anonymity: standardized furniture, pressed sheets, artwork bolted to walls, everything designed to leave no impression, to hold no memory of those who pass through. Like me.

I find a boxing gym the very next day after my arrival. It's not difficult—Bangkok has dozens of them, some tourist traps, others legitimate facilities where professionals train. I choose one that seems to split the difference and contact the gym beforehand to confirm they can take on an alleged fighter who may or may not exist by tomorrow.

The gym is in the basement of a nondescript office building, tucked away from the chaos of the street above. Unlike most boxing gyms in the city, this one is air-conditioned—a luxury that speaks to its clientele. When I arrive, the space is nearly empty. A single fighter works a heavy bag in the corner, his iPad propped on the ring, playing what appears to be a university lecture.

The hour I spend at the boxing gym provides the only architecture to my amorphous days. The space is utilitarian—heavy bags hang in a row along one wall like prisoners awaiting interrogation, a ring dominates the other corner like an altar to controlled aggression, mirrors line another wall reflecting fluorescent truths no one wants to face. The basement location means no windows, no distractions, nothing but the confrontation with self.

I wrap my hands with the methodical precision that has become second nature, the cotton strips tight but not constricting, protecting the tiny bones that can shatter with one miscalculation. The trainer approaches. He's tall and compact, with the distinctive topography of a Thai Stephen Merchant.

I begin to shadowbox, feinting, moving through combinations, pivoting, and throwing punches at my reflection. I've always taken particular pride in being a southpaw—it's given me an edge against orthodox fighters, a built-in strategic advantage, and a way to be fundamentally different in a sport that prizes conformity.

The coach watches with a frown that deepens with each punch. Unlike dozens of trainers before him, he's visibly unimpressed, almost disgusted. "Your balance not good," he says with brutal honesty. "Your mechanics is wrong."

The criticism pierces something vital. For years, coaches have worked with my style, adapting their teaching rather than critiquing the fundamentals of my approach. This man sees flaws no one has pointed out before. Maybe they always existed, lurking beneath compliments and band-aid adjustments. Perhaps no one was cruel enough to tell me the truth. Maybe I've been fighting with a handicap I created for myself, another self-inflicted wound in a collection of scars.

"Show me your footwork," he says, positioning himself across from me like a mirror I don't want to look into.

He demonstrates a sequence I haven't seen before—a weight transfer, a subtle angle change that creates an unexpected opening. It looks deceptively simple. I attempt to mirror him and immediately stumble, my feet tangling beneath me like I've never stepped into a ring before, like I'm five years old again, clumsy with inherited awkwardness.

"No, no. Like this." He demonstrates again, slower this time, his patience professional rather than compassionate.

I try once more. Again, my body betrays me. My coordination has abandoned me altogether, fled with whatever remaining purpose I had. I'm no longer the experienced fighter who has trained for years, who has even coached others in the delusion of competence. I've defined myself through this sport for so long, and now I can't even execute a new footwork pattern without stumbling like someone who's never thrown a punch, never taken a hit, never understood the language of controlled violence.

"Takes practice," the trainer says, neither judgmental nor particularly encouraging. Just factual, like my mother's death notification. "Your stance no good. Not good mechanics."

Despite the criticism, training is something to fill the days, something to anchor me in a city where I am invisible, in a world where my mother is dead, and no one around me knows or cares about either fact. It's also humbling—after years of training, to be told that my fundamental approach has been flawed all along. Maybe this is why I've never reached the level I aspired to. Perhaps I've been living with illusions about my abilities, just as I've been living with illusions about someday reconciling with a mother who had already written me out of her heart long before her body surrendered.

I execute combinations with mechanical imprecision while the trainer offers corrections to a sham fighter whose purpose has silently drained away like blood from a fatal wound. He doesn't know about my mother. He doesn't know about my abandoned fight in Kuala Lumpur. He sees only the technical deficiencies, not the hollow space causing each stumble, each misplaced step, each punch thrown with the form of someone fighting underwater.

The session ends. I'm drenched in sweat despite the air conditioning, my body tired in a way that should bring relief but doesn't touch the deeper exhaustion beneath, the kind that sleep can't cure, that rest can't touch, that extends beyond muscle and bone into whatever remains of my soul.

"Tomorrow, same time," he says; our transaction is complete, my existence already fading from his attention.

"Yes," I say, though every part of me wants to run from this new humiliation, this fresh evidence of my fundamental wrongness.

He nods, already turning to other tasks. The other fighter continues his routine, never once having acknowledged our existence. There is no expectation of connection, no personal investment—just the simple transaction of skill for payment, instruction for effort. The cleanness of this exchange is comforting in its limitations, its honesty—no pretense of caring. No illusion of permanence.

When I return to the hotel, the silence feels absolute, a vacuum that could implode at any moment. The contrast between the controlled chaos of the gym and the sterile quiet of my room creates a border I cross daily—from one type of emptiness to another. The ritual of training connects me to what I was before, but like shadow boxing, I go through motions that no longer have consequences, that connect with nothing solid.

In the shower, I let hot water flow against muscles that have begun to relax from exertion. Steam fills the small bathroom until it resembles the fog I've been living in. I press my forehead against the tiled wall and close my eyes. For the first time since receiving the news of my mother's death, tears come—not in wracking sobs or dramatic releases but in a steady, quiet flow that mingles with the shower water until I can't distinguish between the two, between what comes from me and what comes from outside, between grief and relief, between loss and liberation.

I towel off and lie naked on the bed. Water drips from my hair onto the commercial bedspread. Even this small act of dampening hotel property seems like trespassing, a disruption of the perfect impersonality these rooms are designed to maintain. Nothing here is meant to remember me. Nothing here carries any trace of who I am or what I've lost. I could die in this room and whatever stain I left would be cleaned, sanitized, erased before the next guest arrives.

My phone lights up with a message.

"Hey, just checking in"

What would my friend think if he knew I was here? This isn't the first time I've withdrawn from who I was supposed to be. Each departure carries its own story, its own excuse—injury, scheduling conflict. Now death. The most legitimate reason, yet somehow, I can't bring myself to share it. The embarrassment of being unreliable once again, of discovering I've been fundamentally flawed as a fighter all along, outweighs the gravity of my mother's passing. What does that say about me? About the value I place on the woman who gave me life, then took away her love as if reclaiming a loan with interest?

I stare at the message, unable to formulate a response that wouldn't either reveal too much or add another layer of deception. What would I say? That I'm in Bangkok instead of Kuala Lumpur because my mother died, and I fled a fight he didn't know I was preparing for? That the weight of her death crushed me to the point where I couldn't face the ring, couldn't face myself, couldn't face the prospect of violence when I was already being destroyed from within? That I ran away because the alternative was something far darker, far more final, involving sleeping pills and sharp objects or alcohol or whatever other methods of self-destruction Bangkok might offer a man with no tethers?

The absurdity strikes me like a counter-punch I never saw coming. How have I become a person who hides so much? What kind of son prioritizes avoiding uncomfortable conversations over confronting the finality of his mother's passing? What fighter abandons the ring not through injury or circumstance but through the sheer gravitational pull of despair? What kind of friend builds walls instead of bridges when the walls themselves are crumbling?

I set the phone down. Tomorrow, I tell myself, I'll craft something appropriate—something that maintains the fiction of normalcy without inviting questions.

This is the brutal reality of the world I inhabit—one where every relationship is transactional, every connection conditional, every interaction metered and measured. The trainer at the gym doesn't care about my grief; he cares about the hourly rate and whether I'll return tomorrow. The hotel staff doesn't see me, only the credit card that secures the room. My one friend reaches out not because he senses my crisis but because our regular exchange of messages has been disrupted, like a machine noticing a missing part.

I could have all the money in the world and still not be able to purchase what I most need—a family that didn't disown me, a brother who didn't die when I was five, a mother who didn't leave this world with our relationship in ruins. I could buy the most expensive training camp, the most luxurious accommodations, but I cannot buy belonging. I cannot purchase witnesses to my life. I cannot pay someone to care whether I exist tomorrow.

The gym sells temporary purpose. The hotel sells transient shelter. My friend offers intermittent connection. Nothing is unconditional. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is real in the way I desperately need something to be authentic.

For now, I find myself in the space between heartbeats—those fleeting moments when time seems to stand still, when the next beat is anticipated but not inevitable.

In these moments, I understand why the void calls to me with such persuasive clarity. When you've never truly belonged anywhere, when family is a synonym for loss, when your only confidant exists as text bubbles on a screen—the idea of non-existence carries its own terrible comfort. Not as a desire for death exactly but as a longing for the end of this persistent aloneness, this conscious exile from human connection.

At thirty-three, I have lived twenty-eight years as the sole survivor of my original family unit. My brother's death carved the first hollow space inside me when I was five; everything since has been variations on that original loss, echoes of that first absence. Sometimes, I wonder if I'm living in the wrong timeline—if somewhere there's a version of me with a brother who grew up, with parents who stayed, with connections that anchor me to the earth instead of this perpetual state of orbit without gravity.

My mother exists now only as memory, as unfinished business, as a death notification from a country that never welcomed my visits. My father, though presumably still alive somewhere, might as well be a ghost. My brother, gone so long, I sometimes question whether I've manufactured the few memories I have of him. This is the genealogy of absence that defines me.

I open WhatsApp up by habit. The text from my friend remains unanswered, a digital hand extended across distance that I can't bring myself to grasp. I type "Fine, just busy" and delete it immediately. Then "My mother died" and delete that too. Every response feels either dishonest or excessive. There is no middle ground between the lie and the abyss.

Tomorrow, I’ll return to the boxing gym like a terminal patient attending physical therapy. I'll learn the proper mechanics, the correct weight distribution, the meticulous reconstruction of fundamentals—an elaborate ritual of denial. I'll shadowbox with ghosts at thirty-three, perfecting footwork for a body that may not have many miles left in it. Each punch thrown is practice for a fight that will never materialize, each correction a prescription for a future I've already decided against. The gym becomes both crematorium and cathedral—a place where one identity burns away while another forms from ashes too scattered to ever coalesce.

And in between sessions, I'll continue to exist in hotel rooms that won't remember me, ordering room service from people who won't recognize me tomorrow, sleeping in beds made by hands that have no interest in who occupies them. I'll continue to move through a world that neither welcomes nor rejects me, that simply allows my passage through it like water around a stone.

I exist in that uncertain interval where suicide is both constantly available and temporarily suspended—caught between the gravity of ancestry and the weightlessness of isolation. Not living so much as not-yet-dying. Just present in the silence, listening for what comes next, wondering if anything will. My pulse counts down the moments, each beat both indictment and possibility—the indictment of continuing without purpose, the possibility that purpose might yet be found. In the razor-thin space between those heartbeats lies the only question that matters: whether the next one is worth waiting for.